HTLI: Legal Experts Examine 50 Years of Modification in Copyright Law in the Digital Age
A Q&A with Tyler Ochoa
Campus Technology asks Tyler Ochoa, a teacher of law at Santa Clara University’s School of Law, about a day-long event, Intellectual Property Law: How it Began, How It’s Going, to be held at Santa Clara University on Jan. 30. Used by SCU’s High Tech Law Institute, the occasion will assemble legal professionals on copyright and IP law to think about the previous 50 years and the future of IP in the digital age.
< img height="412"alt ="Santa Clara University law teachers 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 professors share in the creation of High Tech Law Institute programs. Picture (delegated 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 event on January 30. How did the conference themes take shape? And what are a few of the problems panelists might pick 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 development in intellectual property law. And it ends up it’s likewise the 80th anniversary of the federal Hallmark Act of 1946. It’s the 10th anniversary of the Defend Trade Secrets Act. And it’s one year short of the 75th anniversary of the Patent Act. While they do not line up exactly, we observed all of these anniversaries assembling. So, we thought we would widen our subject– so as not to restrict ourselves to copyright law, but to ask what, in basic, has actually been occurring in copyright law in the previous a number of decades.
We asked our speakers to address 4 main styles extremely broadly. We’re not inquiring to choose specific subjects ahead of the conference, but to surprise us as the conference unfolds. So HTLI conference participants and speakers will take a look at copyright, at trademark, at patent law, and at trade secret law through the lens of what’s occurred in these 4 locations in the previous 50 years or two.
We’re asking: How did these laws establish? How did they happen? What’s been going well? What’s gone right? In what ways have intellectual property laws added to the development of technology and culture? And what’s gone wrong? In what ways 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 sort of aspects of copyright law– one of the 4 main conference themes– might be considered?
Ochoa: In copyright law, I believe there have actually been three really essential developments that have fundamentally changed how copyright law has actually been formed.
One is the widespread adoption of personal computers starting in the 1980s. Suddenly, everyone has a way of replicating copyrighted works extremely cheaply and easily, right at their fingertips. And software application becomes an essential topic of copyright law in manner ins which had actually not existed before.
So, we need to address what elements of software are secured by copyright, what elements of software are not protected by copyright, and how we handle the reality that computer systems run only by copying information into their dynamic memory. Every operation you do with a computer begins with a prospective act of recreation, because the information needs to be copied into the memory of the computer system in order to deal with it.
The 2nd advancement is the industrial advancement of the Internet in the mid-1990s. The Web as a research study task returns to the 1960s, so there were computer technology scientists working with the Web before that. But starting in the 1990s, the Internet gets tossed available to everyone. Therefore now you have a means of distributing copyrighted works easily, around the world. It provides both new chances for dispersing copyrighted works really inexpensively and easily in digital type rather than in the kind of print, along with [on the darker side] a brand-new ways for unauthorized copying, or piracy, on a worldwide scale.