4/11/2003

EAST LANSING, Mich. - Michigan State University will host a public lecture, "The Escalating Copyright Wars," at 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 16, in the Board Room of the MSU-DCL College of Law Building on the MSU campus.

Peter K. Yu, a prolific scholar and leading expert in international intellectual property and communications law who will join the MSU-DCL faculty in the fall, will talk about the emergence of digital technology, the Internet and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and the problems they have created for copyright holders.

"Information industries like music and film are critically dependent on well-defined intellectual property rights," said Johannes Bauer, associate professor of telecommunication and associate director of the James H. and Mary B. Quello Center for Telecommunication Management and Law at MSU. "Without such rights, their ability to generate business revenue and income is undermined."

Digital technology allows the creation of perfect copies of an original piece of work at very low costs, potentially threatening the livelihood of information industries, Bauer added.

"Congress has reacted to the concerns of content industries by passing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 and subsequent laws intended to strengthen copyright protection," said Bauer. "However, in doing so, Congress has curtailed the rights of users to gain access to information under the fair use provisions of copyright law."

Yu is acting assistant professor of law; executive director of the Intellectual Property Law Program; and deputy director of the Howard M. Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City. He is also a research associate of the Program in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the Center for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford.

Sponsored by the Quello Center and MSU-DCL, the discussion is open to faculty, staff, students and the general public. Admission is free and a reception will follow the presentation at 6 p.m. RSVP to Brenda Dilday at (517) 432-8001 or dildayb@msu.edu. More details are available at http://quello.msu.edu

The Quello Center resides in MSU's College of Communication Arts and Sciences. It was established in 1998 to be a worldwide focal point for excellence in research, teaching and the development and application of expertise in telecommunication management and policy.

MSU-DCL, formerly known as Detroit College of Law, was founded in 1891 and was the first law school in Detroit. To extend its commitment to educational excellence, the Detroit College of Law affiliated with Michigan State University in 1995 and moved to MSU's East Lansing campus in 1997.