While the term “artificial intelligence” (AI) may conjure up visions of campy ’50s science fiction movies or epic man-versus-machine chess duels, for Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Mickie Piatt, it has a much more practical application: as an anecdotal case study for the intellectual property (IP) law classes she teaches.

The case study centers on a piece of real-world software, an automated book-authoring program that can be customized to mimic the writing styles of various famous authors via an artificial intelligence engine. The twist? She analyzes the implications of this software, and the mimicked writing it produces, from the perspective of an IP lawyer.

“One of the interesting questions is, who owns the copyright?” asks Piatt, also the executive director of Chicago-Kent’s IP law program. “Is it the computer? Is it the person who programmed the AI? Is it the people whose heads were mined to create the knowledge base? Or is it [the author] whose style they’re stealing? Those are just the obvious questions, but there are a lot more you could explore.” Piatt’s case study is a perfect illustration of the often confusing and contradictory applications of IP law.

In part, these are the kinds of issues that IP law is intended to define—ownership rights inherent in (or exclusive to) creative and innovative works. Broadly defined as copyrights (artistic material and multimedia), trademarks (brand identities), industrial designs (styles of industrial objects), patents (inventions), and trade secrets (proprietary information of a business or process), IP is exactly what the term implies—property. As with any other asset, it can be bought, sold, transferred, and licensed; often it is an extremely lucrative asset for a corporation.

Piatt goes on to explain how her department has restructured the entire IP law curriculum in recent years so it will better represent what students will experience as actual practitioners: “What we’re doing is trying to encourage students to take classes that are not perceived as IP classes, but [those] that we think will make them better practitioners if they can apply what they know in a broader context.”

The formula she outlines is unique: adding courses to the core curriculum that are not typically considered IP-related (Evidence, Administrative Law, Remedies, and Anti-Trust), and creating the “capstone experience”—a requirement of all third-year certificate students—designed to make students think more broadly about IP issues.

In Chicago-Kent’s capstone experience, students must participate in one of three programs: a paid externship with a qualified law firm or corporation; a clinical experience known as the IP Law Clinic, in which students work with corporate or faculty entrepreneurs to resolve patent issues related to their inventions; or the Strategies in Intellectual Property course, in which students act as practicing attorneys, tackling issues that integrate the various branches of IP law. “It’s not all just pure litigation,” according to Chicago-Kent’s IP law program Associate Director Tim Holbrook, “it can also have licensing and negotiation aspects to it.”

The approach seems to be working. Although Chicago-Kent’s IP law program has been around for two full decades (an eternity in the IP field) and was one of the first of its kind in the country, it recently received one of its biggest honors to date: U.S. News and World Report tabbed it as one of the Top 10 programs of its kind in the country. Holbrook shrugs off the honor. “It’s one of those things we don’t want to put too much weight into, because we’re always afraid of overemphasizing the rankings.”

Harold Krent, dean of Chicago-Kent, singles out another unique focus of the school’s curriculum: International IP Law, the first master’s program of its kind in the country. “Global concerns are more and more predominating, so you need to think not just of United States patent law, but also that of Japan and England. We try to introduce more international considerations than other schools throughout our curriculum.”

Academia is taking notice of this worldly approach. “In the last 15 years, the internationalization of Chicago-Kent’s curriculum has proceeded at a breathtaking pace,” says Brian Havel, director of DePaul’s International and Comparative Law Program. “IP, in particular, has become an internationally oriented subject thanks to the globalization of commerce and technology. The Chicago-Kent IP program has adapted itself very well, in both its curriculum and its scholarly publications, to the implications of globalization.”

It’s important to note that the globalization of IP is more than just a problem for academics to grapple with; it has also created a new set of obstacles for domestic corporations of all shapes and sizes. For instance, the decision of whether to file for patents in foreign countries has become absolutely critical to the healthy development of many businesses.

IP attorney and alumna Adrienne Naumann (LAW ’84) explains that filing patent applications in multiple countries can be financially prohibitive, even for large corporations. Additionally, “If you file a patent in this country, it can still be kept confidential if you forfeit your rights to file overseas,” she says—but this confidentially goes out the window once you file outside of the United States. “Then the client has to make a decision whether they want to invest in filing overseas and having their confidential information published, whether or not they ultimately obtain the patent, or whether they just want to restrict their territory to the United States and have it remain confidential.” In other words a mistake or oversight in the patent application process has the potential not only to shut the doors on foreign markets, but also to expose the vitals of your patents to competitors all over the world.

Of course, globalization isn’t the only force driving the explosive growth of intellectual property in today’s marketplace. Innovation and advances in technology often dictate how intellectual property is defined—and redefined. “The pace of technological change has increased so much, one needs to continually refresh one’s assumptions about how copyright or patents should work,” Krent explains. “There was no real way to anticipate the pressures on the copyright system with the advent of file sharing on the Internet.”

While peer-to-peer file sharing may be the most visible IP issue these days, it is by no means the most controversial; many issues integral to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are bitterly divided. Perhaps no topic better illustrates the complexities and ethical ambiguities of these issues than those surrounding the patentability of human genes.

“Many recent articles have been highly critical of gene patents,” says Chicago-Kent alumnus Mike Harlin (LAW. ’96), a practicing IP lawyer for McAndrews, Held, and Malloy, “saying they were holding back diagnoses and cures for disease. Others believe that granting patents on isolated genes stimulates investment in research on those genes and in drugs to treat genetic disorders.”

Holbrook explains the legal restrictions behind the controversy: “Generally speaking you can’t get a patent on something that already exists—if it’s already a product of nature, there’s no patent eligibility.” Although highly controversial, he says that the key to the legal patentability of the human gene “is that you can get a patent on something that has been purified and isolated, even if it exists in nature.

“What they’re doing is patenting the sequence of the good DNA, the functional aspect of the gene. So they isolate that genetic sequence, and the idea is that what you’re claiming is a very complex chemical compound.”