The NLS Public Lecture Series | Coding Nature’s Code

The NLS Public Lecture Series invites you to a talk on ‘ Coding Nature’s Code‘ by Prof. Katharina Pistor. The event will take place on Thursday, October 11, 2021 from 5.00 PM to 6.00 PM.

About the Speaker

Prof. Katharina Pistor, Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School & Director of the Law School’s Center on Global Legal Transformation. Katharina Pistor is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions.

Abstract

The legal code can also be used to code knowledge, including of nature’s own code, by legally enclosing it to the exclusion of others. Most intellectual property rights are of only limited duration so that the fountain of wealth they create will dry out eventually. Still, there are ways to prolong their life span by altering some features of the original invention, or by recoding them with legal modules that do not have an expiration date, such as trade secrecy law.

The paper is available here.