Hon. Alex Kozinski, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is the 2005 Distinguished IP Visitor

Lewis & Clark Law School is honored to host the Honorable Alex Kozinski as the sixth annual Distinguished Intellectual Property Visitor. Judge Kozinski will visit the Law School from February 28 through March 2, 2005, to interact with students, faculty and members of the bench and bar in a variety of settings.

Judge Kozinski is a prolific writer and has delivered numerous speeches on a wide variety of issues, including expert testimony after Daubert, privacy in the workplace, and copyright and trademark law. His legal commentary has appeared in several national law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Stanford Law Review. Judge Kozinski has also written a number of book reviews and humorous essays, appearing in such national publications as Slate, Forbes, and The New York Times.

During nearly two decades on the Ninth Circuit, Judge Kozinski has written important opinions–often for the court, and sometimes in dissent–on intellectual property matters. His notable cases include Mattel, Inc. V. MCA Records, Inc. (2002), rejecting Mattel’s trademark infringement claim against Aqua, a Danish band, for its song “Barbie Girl”; Micro Star v. FormGen Inc. (1998), upholding FormGen’s copyright infringement claim against Micro Star for distributing CD copies of “Duke Nukem 3D” player-authored game levels that had been posted on the Internet; New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing (1992), approving a fair use defense to the boy band’s trademark infringement claim against a newspaper’s 900-number-based reader poll about the band; and White v. Samsung Electronics America (1993), dissenting from the denial of en banc rehearing in a case that upheld Vanna White’s right-of-publicity claim against Samsung’s use of a futuristic, Vanna-like robot in an advertisement for VCRs. Given his great interest in intellectual property law issues, not to mention his avowed love for video games, Judge Kozinski will doubtless continue to write influential copyright and trademark opinions for years to come.