DESCRIPTION
29th Annual BTLJ-BCLT Spring Symposium: Origins, Evolution, and Possible Futures of the 1976 Copyright Act
Panel 4: The Shifting Line Between Federal and State Protection
April 16, 2026
1.50 General CLE Offered
Event Information | Agenda | Resource(s) | Speaker Bio(s) & Contact Info
At the Berkeley Technology Law Journal’s 29th Annual Symposium, Professors R. Anthony Reese, Marketa Trimble, Guy Rub, and Shyamkrishna Balganesh examined the federalization of unpublished works under the 1976 Copyright Act, the residual terrain of state copyright statutes, the contract-preemption frontier under Section 301, and the misappropriation doctrine’s corrupted legislative history—concluding that the House Report’s endorsement of hot news misappropriation described a statutory provision that was never enacted, and that courts have been building doctrine on that error for decades, with direct and unresolved consequences for data scraping, AI training, and the boundary between state and federal intellectual property protection.
Instructor(s)
R. Anthony Reese, Professor of Law, UC Irvine School of Law
Marketa Trimble, Professor of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law
Guy Rub, Professor of Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law
Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Peter Menell, Professor and Faculty Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, UC Berkeley School of Law