Frank Field points to an upcoming symposium at Seton Hall on “Peer to Peer at the Crossroads: New Developments and New Directions for the Law and Business of Peer-to-Peer Networking”. Here’s a summary from the symposium announcement:
This Symposium will review recent developments in the law and business of peer-to-peer networks, with a view to determining where the law is going and where it should go. We will examine both the theoretical and practical implications of recent decisions and legislative initiatives, and will offer different perspectives on where the intersection between P2P technology and the law should lie. Our panelists include scholars and practitioners as well as representative from the U.S. Copyright Office.
This sounded pretty good. But reading the announcement more carefully, I noticied something odd: the speakers are all lawyers. If you’re having a conference whose scope includes business and technology, it seems reasonable to have at least some representation from the technology or business communities. Maybe on the panel about “Business Models, Technology, and Trends”?
Now I have nothing against lawyers. Some lawyers really understand technology. A few even understand it deeply. But if I were running a conference on law and technology, and I invited only technologists to speak, this would be seen, rightly, as a big problem. It wouldn’t be much of an excuse for me to say that those technologists know a lot about the law. If I’m inviting ten speakers for a conference on technology and the law, surely I have one slot for somebody whose primary expertise is in the law.
Yet the same argument, running in the other direction, seems not to apply sometimes. Why not?
