HTLI: Legal Specialists Analyze 50 Years of Change in Intellectual Property Law in the Digital Age
A Q&A with Tyler Ochoa
School Technology asks Tyler Ochoa, a teacher of law at Santa Clara University’s School of Law, about a day-long occasion, Copyright Law: How it Started, How It’s Going, to be held at Santa Clara University on Jan. 30. Offered by SCU’s High Tech Law Institute, the event will assemble legal experts on copyright and IP law to consider the previous 50 years and the future of IP in the digital age.
< img height="412"alt ="Santa Clara University law professors share in the creation of High Tech Law Institute programs" width ="644"src ="https://campustechnology.com/-/media/EDU/CampusTechnology/2025/12/20251208HTLI.jpg"/ > Santa Clara University law teachers share in the production of High Tech Law Institute programs. Photo (left to right): Edward Lee, Zahr Said, and Tyler Ochoa. Courtesy HTLI and Santa Clara University.
Mary Grush: You’re a specialist in copyright law and a moderator and conference organizer for HTLI’s occasion on January 30. How did the conference themes take shape? And what are a few of the issues panelists might select to talk about?
Tyler Ochoa: We began by keeping in mind that next year, 2026, is the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Copyright Act, which is an important advancement in copyright law. And it turns out it’s also the 80th anniversary of the federal Hallmark Act of 1946. It’s the 10th anniversary of the Defend Trade Tricks Act. And it’s one year short of the 75th anniversary of the Patent Act. While they don’t line up exactly, we discovered all of these anniversaries converging. So, we thought we would widen our topic– so as not to limit ourselves to copyright law, however to ask what, in general, has been taking place in copyright law in the past several years.
We asked our speakers to resolve 4 primary themes very broadly. We’re not asking them to pick specific subjects ahead of the conference, however to shock us as the conference unfolds. So HTLI conference participants and speakers will look at copyright, at hallmark, at patent law, and at trade secret law through the lens of what’s occurred in these 4 locations in the past 50 years or so.
We’re asking: How did these laws establish? How did they come to be? What’s been going well? What’s gone right? In what methods have copyright laws added to the advancement of technology and culture? And what’s failed? In what methods have the laws not was successful or have created issues that might not otherwise have existed? And then to look forward, to the future …
Grush: What type of elements of copyright law– among the four main conference styles– might be considered?
Ochoa: In copyright law, I think there have actually been 3 extremely important advancements that have actually essentially altered how copyright law has actually been shaped.
One is the extensive adoption of computers starting in the 1980s. Suddenly, everyone has a way of replicating copyrighted works really inexpensively and easily, right at their fingertips. And software ends up being a crucial subject of copyright law in ways that had actually not existed before.
So, we have to resolve what aspects of software are protected by copyright, what elements of software application are not secured by copyright, and how we deal with the truth that computers run just by copying information into their vibrant memory. Every operation you finish with a computer system starts with a prospective act of reproduction, because the information needs to be copied into the memory of the computer in order to work with it.
The 2nd development is the business advancement of the Internet in the mid-1990s. The Internet as a research study task goes back to the 1960s, so there were computer technology scientists dealing with the Web before that. However starting in the 1990s, the Web gets tossed open to everyone. And so now you have a method of dispersing copyrighted works easily, worldwide. It provides both new chances for distributing copyrighted works extremely cheaply and easily in digital type rather than in the kind of print, in addition to [on the darker side] a new methods for unauthorized copying, or piracy, on an around the world scale.