There has been a string of exciting developments at Berkeley Law School and the Asian IP Project that I lead.

Several firms have come on board as sponsors of this project, and several more are in the offing.  Via Licensing, a subsidiary of Dolby, has been an active supporter, and released a press release on our planned collaborative projects.  Joe Siino, Via’s Vice President noted, “Our involvement with the Asia IP Project at UC Berkeley helps us fulfill our goal of elevating the level of mutual understanding and trust between leading innovators, companies and policymakers in Asia and the West.”  I look forward to working with Via in the years ahead, including during the upcoming IPBC Global conference in San Francisco in June and in planned seminars on licensing in China.

This April, I will be speaking again at the upcoming Fordham International IP Conference on trade secrets and judicial reform in China on April 5. On April 13, I will be joining the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology in its annual conference with the Berkeley Journal on law and Technology.  The theme for this year is “The Administrative Law of Intellectual Property”.  I will be offering comparative perspectives on China’s use of administrative procedures to develop a system of “IP for the Masses”, which includes low-cost rights and low-cost remedies.

In the upcoming months, Berkeley will be hosting the  IP Scholars Conference, which will have an Asian law component.  We have also proposed a program in the fall on international IP litigation, several roundtables in the US and China (including the US-China IP Cooperation Dialogue), a program on pharmaceutical patent linkage in China and start-ups, continuing discussions and projects around use of empirical data in Chinese IP, and a series of events in late May at Chinese universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wuhan with Prof. Robert Merges.

I will also be offering my Chinese IP class for two credits at Berkeley Law in the fall, where there will be guest lecture opportunities (check out this link when the class schedules are posted).  There are also other planned programs in the works with Chinese law schools.

As we roll out a series of programs, we also continue to host and welcome visitors to the Bay Area.  On March 27, we were privileged to host former SIPO Commissioner Dr. Gao Lulin on a visit to Berkeley.  Dr. Gao’s contributions to the development of China’s IP system have been enormous.

In case you missed it, there have also been several recent programs on Chinese IP that I have been participating in.  I recently  spoke at the Sedona Conference on International Patent Litigation, the University of Texas Advanced Patent Law Institute, as well as Santa Clara’s High Tech Law Institute.

For further information on our Asian efforts at Berkeley Law, contact the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.