With each passing year, intellectual property (IP) seems to play an even more vital role in today's economy. But despite being ubiquitous, knowledge of how IP works, its laws and the challenges it faces in the digital world are limited to a relatively small group of legal professionals.

Luke Dauchot, partner at Kirkland & Ellis, however, is hoping to change that through teaching a novel course, “The Entrepreneur's Guide to Intellectual Property,” at the University of Southern California's (USC) Marshall Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

The first-of-its-kind class, which is being offered in USC's current fall semester, aims to instill IP knowledge in undergraduate students in the hopes they gain an appreciation of its power and place in the economy.

Dauchot connected with Legaltech News to discuss what the course offers, how he intends to teach IP classes, and the crisis that IP market finds itself in given the explosion of internet of things (IoT) devices, modern search technology, and rapid innovation.

LTN: Can you explain what the course covers?

Luke Dauchot: The course is really unlike any that I know of in that it addresses IP at an undergraduate level through an approach that isn't really geared to the nuts and bolts of patent law, trademark law, trade secret law and copyright law. Although we do cover some of that, the gist of the course is getting students to appreciate the value of IP in today's economy.

Why is it so important to understand the value of IP in today's economy?

There was a time as recently as 25 years ago where if you look at the average value proposition of companies, 30 percent of it was IP, and the rest of it were brick and mortar assets. Today, that is flipped around: If you look at those numbers today, you're basically looking at roughly 70 percent of the value being IP, so it's completely shifted.

How do students go about understanding this value?

The structure of the course began with a focus on some of the history behind IP in the U.S. and then covered the basics of all four elemental staples of IP, patent trade markets, copyrights and trade secrets.

But we then quickly shifted gears to focus on how that IP works in today's economy. We started with a course dedicated to startup companies. For that course, we brought a few startups in and a Kirkland private equity lawyer in, and we introduced students to real life examples of how these startups relied on IP to get their foothold in the market.

We also have someone from Hulu coming in who is going to explain how IP impacts the entertainment business, so we'll focus on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act issues, fair use issues, piracy, those types of things. The idea is to walk through how IP works in that context as well.

Is this course a step toward law school?

A few have approached me about law school, but I don't get the sense that many have made up their minds that law school is something they want to do. But more importantly, the course is not a pre-law course—instead, the idea here is to expose the students to the power of IP in today's economy.

What is one of the biggest challenges facing IP today?

What you have now is an incredible amount of convergence in what once were fairly disparate and siloed technical areas. To give you an example, look at medical devices and telecommunications; there is more and more convergence there.

There may be cars that will eventually be equipped with sensors and telecommunications abilities that allow them to be able to detect medical issues with drivers. And wrist watches were once meant to kept time; now, these wrist watches are associated with conveying all sorts of information, medical data included.

So if you look at technology, it's bringing so many different areas. There is so much convergence, and I think that is going to create a number of interesting policy issues over how you go about creating and protecting those kinds of IP.

Does this mean more fights over IP ownership?

The number of patent applications being filed have pretty much quadrupled over the course of the last 15 years. It's a huge increase, and so that begs the question, are the resources that exist to create and protect IP keeping up with the demand? The Patent and Trademark Office has not grown four-fold.

And an added complication is access to information. There was a day where prior art searches were relatively straightforward, and you could count on what the patent office picked up to be pretty much what someone challenging a patent might pick up down the road.

Well, that's all changed with new search and other information access technology. Technology renders it possible to pick up almost any piece of prior art that exists almost anywhere in the world. Access to information has changed such that the pool of prior art is almost limitless. So then, what are the implications of keeping a patent prosecution ex parte?

Through an ex parte process, the examiner makes a decision of whether or not there is prior art out there, but the reality is that, what the examiner can pick up and what the applicant can pick up is sometimes nowhere near what somebody who is really interested in challenging the patent will pick up. This again is because of the technology available to access information.