|
Now, Glushko is helping give Samuelson a more permanent podium. Powered by the killing he made as an executive at Net software pioneer Commerce One Corp., the pair is setting up the nation's first public-interest law clinic to battle over the Internet-related issues on which Samuelson has become one of the nation's leading academic lawyers. Based at the Boalt Hall law school at the University of California at Berkeley, the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic will represent consumer interests on Internet privacy, communications regulation, and especially intellectual-property issues such as copyrights and patents that have put Samuelson on the map in both academia and Silicon Valley. "I'm an old-fashioned person: I believe in a sense of balance," Samuelson says. "You want to give a certain amount of protection to innovators, but you don't want to give too much, because it cuts off competition and future innovation. And it can also squelch free discussion." "VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS." The clinic is the result of two careers -- and a marriage built partly on shared concerns about how technology can inadvertently undermine social values. Samuelson's writings have made her reputation as someone who thinks corporate interests have grabbed too much power as the Internet has matured. She has been especially critical of the way copyright law has strengthened the hands of publishers and record companies: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalized even previously legal acts like most reverse-engineering of products, a process that has long helped competitors leapfrog each others' innovations. Glushko says emerging technology for limiting the reuse of digital works can threaten American institutions as cherished as the public library and used bookstores. "It's easy to see the erosion of the public interest, but the public hasn't had a chance to get its mind around it," Glushko says. "The balance keeps moving in one direction, and people like Pam have been a voice in the wilderness." What to do about that? Set up a clinic, staffed mostly by students but advised by a board including Samuelson, Glushko, and a bevy of professors who have made Berkeley the law school to watch for new thinking about intellectual property and the Internet. Samuelson has two goals for the clinic: to broaden the horizons of young lawyers who, even at Berkeley, are aiming straight for high-paying careers in private practice, and to bring a different voice to technical legal and regulatory disputes usually dominated by lobbyists for competing interest groups. The agenda: a mix of pro bono lobbying, friend-of-the-court briefs in important appeals court cases, and occasionally representing individuals who need help on cases that are likely to make important new law. "She doesn't take clients," Glushko says. "She takes issues." The usual goal will be to lobby for what Samuelson, the quieter of the founding couple, calls balance. Samuelson says people shouldn't expect a Berkeley public-interest law clinic to be anywhere near as radical as the university's decades-old reputation: "All our students are going into business, so we're not going to attract radicals. But the public interest isn't adequately represented by Silicon Valley lobbying Congress and Congress coming out to Silicon Valley to admire them." BRIDGING DISCIPLINES. Samuelson used to make the trip to Silicon Valley as a visitor herself. She made her name as a teacher at the University of Pittsburgh, where she and Glushko met while working together on a project at Carnegie Mellon University. The 1976 Yale Law School graduate found herself spending a lot of time in the mid-1980s with engineers who were upset about the broad protections courts granted early software makers that engineers thought had merely commercialized well-known programming tricks. Samuelson's real skill may be as much about translation as about law: Friends say she can explain technology to lawyers and explain law to engineers. She has long been a regular contributor to the newsletter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). "She was the bridge between the academics and the practitioners -- and not just the lawyers," says Herma Hill Kay, Boalt's dean. Says Samuelson: "Engineers could communicate with me, and I'd take their reactions and put them in the law reviews." Glushko says the pair commuted to see each other for about a decade after he moved West to pursue his software career -- until Samuelson joined the movement of intellectual-property academics to Berkeley by leaving Pitt in 1996. In 1995, Kay had lured Boston University professor Robert P. Merges to Berkeley, and in January they were joined by Mark Lemley, formerly of the University of Texas. Merges has gained note as a critic of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office's approach to granting patents on methods for doing business on the Internet, arguing that the culture and the pay incentives of the PTO induce examiners to grant more patents than they should. Samuelson's recognitions include a 1997 MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius grant that Glushko says Samuelson spent on research assistants. CRAZY VALUATION. What the three law professors share is a broad belief that the Internet has led to a bigger expansion of intellectual-property rights than necessary to promote innovation, after a period in the 1970s when patent rights especially were diluted by hostile courts and a weak PTO. Says Lemley: "We all agree on the need for a basic balance in intellectual-property law. Neither side has it right. The goal is to work out the right compromises." One result: Kay says intellectual-property courses, once all but off-limits to students without technical degrees as undergraduates, are "breaking down the walls." Lemley's introductory course attracted 200 of the school's 850 students, Kay says. Once Samuelson arrived at Berkeley, where she holds a joint appointment in the schools of law and information management, she and Glushko stepped up their long-standing discussion about opening a center to do more than study how patent and copyright law affects real people. The couple brought the idea to Berkeley's faculty last year, promising to raise the $2.6 million needed to get the clinic off the ground. But a funny thing happened: Commerce One, maker of software for online purchasing exchanges, went public. The value of the stock Glushko got when he sold Veo Systems, a small XML-software company, to Commerce One went berserk. "We went public at $21, and I was selling at $700, so it doesn't take a lot of shares," says Glushko, who is now director of document engineering for Commerce One. He contributed $2 million to the clinic, and the Markle Foundation and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor pitched in $300,000 each. Glushko and Samuelson gave an additional $1 million for scholarships at Berkeley's information management school and have endowed a scholarship at the University of Washington to honor Samuelson's grandmother. "It's nice when you can do the right thing and not even feel it." The idea of the clinic, says Glushko, is to make his wife a sort of institution, ensuring that "she wouldn't have to work until she's 150." And to make sure its focus stays on the issues Samuelson cares about, Glushko insisted on naming the clinic for her. Glushko says the issue was branding. "Pam Samuelson's name means certain things. It identifies the kinds of concerns [the clinic should pursue]. People understand that, but Pam had a hard time with it," he insists. For a lawyer Glushko unabashedly compares to Joan of Arc, the crusade will never completely end. Mullaney covers e-commerce for Business Week in New York. |
