Institute for Information Law & Policy

The Shape-Shifting Subject Matter Requirement of U.S. Patent Law

On October 9, 2007, John A. Squires, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Thomas S. Biemer, Partner, Dilworth Paxson LLC, gave a lecture to New York Law School's intellectual property and patent law students.  If you missed this discussion you can watch it by streaming video here.  You might also be interested in Mr. Squires' recent interview on the subject of significant, recent patent cases and their impact on the financial services industry with Futures Industry Magazine.

Democracy Island

Institute's Democracy Island project featured in a November 8 article in Information Week, "Online Virtual World Is Part Fantasy, Part Civics Experiment" by Christopher Heun.

Do Tank Site Launches

The Do Tank Web Site is now up at http://dotank.nyls.edu.  The Do Tank site replaces the Democracy Design Workshop website and showcases the range of visual, democratic and civic software projects currently under development.  The site includes introductions and links to all of our major design projects, including Cairns, Peer to Patent, Visual Corporation and Contract Commons.  There are links to the various Galleries we've built, including the E-Rulemaking Innovations Gallery and the Democratic Toolkit.

The Do Tank and the Democracy Design Workshop strive to strengthen the ability of groups to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern themselves by designing software and legal code to promote collaboration. Tools alone cannot create a culture of strong groups. Hence Do Tank projects address the role of legal and political institutions, social and business practices and the visual and graphical technologies -- what we term the "social code" -- that may allow groups, not only to foster community, but to take action.