Doug Lichtman
Department: School of Law
Colleges / Universities: UCLA
Contact
405 Hilgard Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Email: lichtman@law.ucla.edu
Website: UCLA faculty profile
Doug Lichtman focuses his teaching and research on topics relating to law and technology. His areas of specialty include patent and copyright law, telecommunications regulation, and information strategy and economics.
Professor Lichtman joined the faculty at UCLA School of Law in 2007 after a tenured teaching career at the University of Chicago. His work has been featured in numerous journals including the Journal of Law & Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Yale Law Journal, and the Harvard Business Review. He co-authored Telecommunications Law and Policy, a textbook that investigates the federal regulatory regime applicable to broadcast television, cable television, radio, telephony, and the Internet. He also regularly writes in the popular press, with recent pieces appearing in the Los Angeles Times and the policy magazine Regulation.
Degrees
B.S.E. Duke University, 1994
J.D. Yale, 1997
Recent Academic Article Summaries
Google Book Search in the Gridlock Economy
Michael Heller’s book The Gridlock Economy argues that too many property rights can block economic growth. Such gridlock results when the property rights are intertwined, so that each right becomes valueless without permission to use the others.
Google Book Search does not face a problem of gridlock.
Rethinking Patent Law's Presumption of Validity
Courts defer too readily to the Patent Office’s original determinations on patent protection.
By deferring so heavily to the Patent Office, current practice lets large numbers of dubious patents survive litigation. That in turn imposes an implicit tax on legitimate business and research endeavors.
Discouraging Patent Holdouts through Reciprocal Commitment
This paper explains how firms could use contracts to avoid complicated patent disputes.
Patent law tends to encourage patent owners to try to use their patents to extort “ransom” from technology firms, but firms can cooperate to solve this problem.
Holding Internet Service Providers Accountable
This article looks at who should pay for illegal use of computers.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be held responsible for some illegal uses of their networks, including copyright piracy, defamation, and computer security breaches.
This casebook surveys telecommunications law.
Like other utilities, telephone and wireless services in the United States tend to be regulated differently from many other businesses.
Blog Posts
Quotes in the News
Lichtman, D. (2012, March 19). American Public Media’s Marketplace.“After the first warning, what do you get? A second warning. After the second, what do you get? A third warning. Basically it's communication.”
Doug Lichtman
School of Law
UCLA
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