International Trademark Association
Services offered: Through its Pro Bono Committee, INTA has established the Trademark Clearinghouse pilot program to bolster the protection of intellectual property by matching eligible clients facing trademark issues with INTA member attorneys so that legal services can be provided free of charge.
The Clearinghouse is intended to serve low-income individuals and/or directors of nonprofit or charitable organizations with low operating budgets (1) who might otherwise not know where to turn or (2) who don’t have access to legal assistance in the area of trademarks. This clearinghouse is the only one currently in existence that is dedicated primarily to trademarks.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Services offered: Litigation defense, with concentration on “impact litigation”, i.e., precedent setting cases; nationwide referrals to attorneys in technology cases.
Eligibility criteria: No formal criteria
Regions covered: Nationwide in U.S.A.
Fees charged: None
Law School Clinic Certification Program
Services offered: This program allows applicants to obtain pro bono legal assistance in both patent and trademark matters while allowing law students enrolled in a participating law school’s clinic program to practice intellectual property law before the USPTO under the strict guidance of a law school faculty clinic supervisor.
Patent Pro Bono Program
Services offered: A nationwide network of independently operated academic and nonprofit organizations that endeavor to match volunteer patent practitioners with financially under-resourced inventors seeking patent protection.
Letter Supporting CASE Act
IIPSJ sends a letter to Congressman Jefferies supporting passage of the CASE Act.
The Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice (IIPSJ) hereby submits the following comments in support of passage of the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019 (HR 2426). IIPSJ was established to address the social justice implications of intellectual property law and policy both domestically and globally. IIPSJ’s work ranges broadly, and includes the scholarly examination of intellectual property law from the social justice perspective; advocacy for social justice-cognizant interpretation, application, and revision of the intellectual property law; efforts to increase the diversity of the intellectual property legal bar; and programs to empower historically and currently disadvantaged and marginalized communities through the development, protection, use, and exploitation of intellectual property.
Click here to read full letter.
MMA
Update on the Passage of the Music Modernization Act
- Idia Egonmwan, a 2L student attorney in the Intellectual Property Clinic at Howard University School of Law.
As many of our membership will recall, earlier this year IIPSJ submitted to Congress both formal comments and also a letter on behalf of intellectual property law and other scholars to support passage of the Compensating Legacy Artists for their Songs, Service, and Important Contributions to Society (CLASSICS) Act and the Music Modernization Act (MMA), and otherwise undertook a public campaign in support of these legislative bills. We are pleased to report that these and other grassroots and other efforts were successful and both acts were passed by Congress on September 18, 2018 (combined into a revised Music Modernization Act) and signed into law by President Trump on October 11, 2018.
What is the Music Modernization Act (MMA)?
The MMA mitigates many of the economic and social inequities perpetuated in the music recording business by creating uniformity in legal protection for pre- and post-1972 sound recordings via the federal copyright system.[1] The MMA is broken into three parts:
- Title I establishes a musical licensing collective to issue and administer blanket mechanical licenses for the use of sound recordings to digital music services and to and collect and distribute royalty payments directly to rights owners, including performing artists;
- Title II compensates pre-1972 sound recording artists by creating a royalty structure; and
- Title III creates a legal right for various musical contributors (producers, mixers, and sound engineering) to collect royalties for digital transmissions of sound recordings.[2]
The IP Social Justice Impact of the MMA
African American and other marginalized creators and artists have historically suffered from legal and social limitations upon their freedom to contract, inequities exacerbated by the systemic manipulation and abuse of the copyright law and music sound recording contracts and licensing agreements. “Legacy” recording artists such as Otis Redding, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and the Temptations were especially disadvantaged in that copyright protection did not extend to pre-1972 sound recording.[3] As a result of the passage of the MMA, composing artists will benefit from more equitable royalty structures under the Copyright Section 115 compulsory mechanical (recording) license (which historically exploited the inferior bargaining power of all artists, but particularly artists of color) (Title I); limited music copyright protection in the form of a digital performance right has been extended to pre-1972 “Legacy” sound recording artists (Title II); and a right for previously uncompensated producers, mixers, and sound engineers to collect royalties for their creative contributions has been established. (Title III).
Fair Compensation and IP Social Justice for Music Creators and Performers
The Music Modernization Act (MMA) is a progressive step for copyright law and the American recording industry, ultimately providing legacy, current, and future musical artists with more equitable compensation for creating, sharing, and performing their work. Utilizing intellectual property as a means of social justice in the music industry is a small subset of how IP law can be used to empower and rebuild marginalized communities. Although not perfect, the MMA represents the outcomes that can be achieved when legal scholars, legislators, and intellectual property and other social justice activists collaborate to preserve the purpose of copyright and other intellectual property law: to promote and encourage socially equitable and beneficial creative labors.
[1] See the Letter from Lateef Mtima, Dir., Institute for Intellectual Property & Social Justice, to Chuck Grassley, Chairman, U.S. S. Comm. on the Judiciary, Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Member, U.S. S. Comm. on the Judiciary, Bob Goodlatte, Chairman, U.S. House of Rep. Comm. on the Judiciary, Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member, U.S. House of Rep. Comm. on the Judiciary (Mar. 14, 2018)
[2] See Mark Wittow, A Modern Melody for the Music Industry: The Music Modernization Act Just Passed Congress and Awaits Presidential Approval, The Nat’l Law Review (Oct. 2, 2018), https://www.natlawreview.com/article/modern-melody-music-industry-music-modernization-act-just-passed-congress-and-awaits
[3] Id.
July 2018
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IP Mosaic
The IIPSJ MOSAIC IP Law and Policy Roundtable Conference
Purpose and Objectives
The IIPSJ Mosaic Roundtable Conference was established to bring together scholars, law and policy makers, and social activists of diverse and multicultural backgrounds and perspectives to explore progressive and non-traditional ideas in intellectual property law, policy, and social activism. Beginning in the late twentieth century, digital information technology and other innovations sparked a paradigm shift in scholarly assessment of the social ordering function of IP protection, exposing the need to critically examine the law’s social justice obligations in promoting human rights, self-determination, cultural progress, and nation-building and evolution. Because IP law and policy makers traditionally value scholarly analyses in their development and interpretation of IP protection, this emerging body of progressive, social justice-oriented IP scholarship, especially when infused with the experience and insights of social activists and policy makers, can provide them with the doctrinal basis for shaping a more socially responsible IP legal regime.
The Mosaic Roundtable Conference Format
Each Roundtable Conference is organized around a specific IP social justice legal issue, policy, or socio-economic problem, and is comprised of four paper or project presentation sessions; each session is divided into a principal presentation, a commentator’s assessment, and open discussion. Representative Roundtable topics include equitable access to health, medicines, knowledge, and information; socially beneficial application of information technology and related advances to IP development and dissemination; legal protection for traditional and indigenous knowledge and expression; and promoting IP awareness, education, and entrepreneurial and socio-political empowerment in marginalized communities. The Roundtable Conference is also amenable to expansion into a two day format, to accommodate plenary panels, keynote presentations, and “incubator project” and work in progress sessions.
IP protection is intended to play an important role in engendering human development, socio-economic empowerment, and social justice. The traditional tools and experience of scholarly analysis, reflection, and discourse, however, are not always readily adaptive toward targeted social action, or what is sometimes referred to as “public intellectualism”. Through the IIPSJ Mosaic Roundtable Conference, IP scholars can work together with political activists, practicing attorneys, community organizers, and policy makers to produce “activist scholarship”, to collaborate on various “IP Empowerment” policy initiatives and projects, and to otherwise help to shape and effectuate a progressive and contemporary IP socio-legal agenda.
2014:The First Annual IP Mosaic Conference: Diverse Voices in IP Scholarship
Luncheon Keynote: Reconstructing the IP Scholar Activist
New to IP
We realize that many entrepreneurs, creators, and inventors may not have a lot of time to research and understand Intellectual Property (IP) law. We created this section of the website to provide some initial information about IP and how to find out more about the IP issues that are relevant to you. We have begun to gather information and resources to answer some of the most common IP related questions. If you have a general IP question* not answered below, feel free to email it to us at updates@iipsj.org.We will continue to update this page as we find new resources and receive new questions.
*Note we cannot provide legal advice but we do include links to organizations that provide free or low cost legal advice.
Intro to Intellectual Property (IP)
The most common types of IP are patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
| Type of IP | Protects | A little more information | Federal Registration for Protection at |
| Patents | Inventions | - rights grant the inventor ownership rights in their invention
- grants the inventor an exclusive right to make, use, offer for sale, or sell the invention |
US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
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| Trademarks | the way we identify who made or provides the products or services | rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark in commerce in connection with the same or similar products or services | USPTO |
| Copyrights | Original works of authorship | rights grant the author the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly | US Copyright Office |
Learn More:
USPTO
Article: What Are Patents, Trademarks, Service marks, and Copyrights?
Video: Basic Facts: Trademarks, Patents, and Copyrights
U.S. Small Business Administration video: Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights
Check out our Legal Resources page to find free and low cost services to help you with your IP.
Check back for additional information.
Net Neutrality, CLE, Blurred Lines, and Recent Events
Highlights from IIPSJ's 15th Annual IP and Social Justice CLE Program at the Howard University School of Law Check out our website for highlights from this year's CLE program. We take a look back at 15 years of providing CLE programming on IP and Social Justice, as well as provide a summary of the event and some of the panels including student reporting on various panels available at the specified links
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