Welcome to IP @ the U, a periodic newsletter for students, alumni, faculty and friends of the University of Utah College of Law's Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. This issue covers a range of IP highlights from the Spring semester.

If you have news about IP events, accomplishments and milestones, please send them to our Program Director, Jorge Contreras.

Congratulations to Victoria Carrington, Jordan Cobabe and Spencer Fennemore, who advanced to the semifinal round of the Rocky Mountain Regional portion of the National Patent Application Drafting Competition organized by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The team both drafted a patent application and presented it at a mock examination hearing and was ably coached by Prof. Sam Tahmassebi.

The Student IP Law Association (SIPLA) has elected its new slate of officers for the 2023-24 academic year. Congratulations to Connor Defriez (President), Jamison Smith (Vice President) and Matt Petersen (Treasurer).

During Spring 2023, Prof. Contreras served as a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in London, UK, where he participated in a number of collaborative projects with leading European academics, practitioners and judges. During his fellowship Contreras lectured at institutions in London, Cambridge, Sheffield and Sussex, UK, as well as Ireland, Denmark and Poland, and will continue to maintain close connections with colleagues at LSE and elsewhere in Europe.

This year, Jordan Cobabe and Victoria Carrington, coached by adjunct faculty members Sam Noel and Dan Thomas provided patent filing advice to a range of interdisciplinary student teams from across the state as part of the Center for Medical Innovation’s annual Bench2Bedside competition. Teams developed innovative biomedical products ranging from software and apps to medical devices and instrumentation.

In August, Emeritus Professor Terry Kogan filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in The Andy Warhol Foundation for The Visual Arts, Inc. v. Lynn Goldsmith, et al. (U.S. 2023), arguing in favor of the photographer whose portrait of Prince was used without permission by Andy Warhol. The Court ruled for Goldsmith, the photographer, in a decision that Kogan calls “a major win for photographers, whose work has been seriously devalued over the past years.”

In the Fall 2023 semester, the College of Law will be offering a wide range of IP classes, from the core Patent (Anderson) and Copyright (Julio) courses, to the annual IP Moot Court Competition (Johnson), to advanced offerings such as IP Transactions (Contreras), Entrepreneurial Law (Tahmassebi) and a seminar on IP, Antitrust and Competition (Contreras). In the Spring, keep an eye out for Trademarks and Unfair Competition (Dellenbach), a new bootcamp on Pharmaceutical Patenting (Webb), a new course titled Music Law (Julio) and the annual Patent Drafting Competition (Horton) and Bench to Bedside Competition Advising (Noel and Thomas). In addition, several new IP-related classes available for law students will be cross-listed from the Department of Economics. Check out the course catalog and class listings if you haven’t already signed up for some of these great IP course offerings.

In Fall 2023, Professor Contreras will again offer IP Transactions using his open access casebook Intellectual Property Licensing and Transactions: Theory and Practice (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022)

Learn more about the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law's Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law on our website.