Description

Rapid technological progress has shifted discussion of the possibility of “post-scarcity society” from science fiction novels and utopian manifestoes to the pages of our newspapers and now to our law review articles. Commentators imagine a world in which three-dimensional printing, advanced robotics, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence will enable the lowcost at-home manufacture of nearly all commodities and provision of nearly all services.

This lecture will consider the implications of post-scarcity society for law and specifically for intellectual property law. It will focus on the social implications of post-scarcity and on the ways in which intellectual property law is already being used around the world to undermine the socially progressive promise of post-scarcity.

About The Speaker

Barton Beebe is the John M. Desmarais Professor of Intellectual Property Law at NYU School of Law, and a co-director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU. Professor Beebe received his JD from Yale Law School, his PhD in English Literature from Princeton University, and his BA from the University of Chicago. He has been the Anne Urowsky Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford.

As a legal scholar, he specialises in the doctrinal, empirical, and cultural analysis of intellectual property law, and has published prolifically in a wide range of journals that include Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review and California Law Review.