[p.ix] It’s been a great ride. During the past several years, it has been my pleasure to serve as the Director of the Intellectual Property Program at the University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law. I have worked with many fine students — teaching them, advising them, overseeing their research papers (including one of the papers published in this issue), even coauthoring a few pieces with them. I have seen them go off to rewarding careers in private practice, government service, business, even academia. I have learned from them, and I thank them for having been part of my life. As I move on now to another law school, after eleven years at the University of Florida, I will treasure these memories.

For much of this time, one of my duties has been to serve as the faculty advisor for this journal. The students have done a good job every year, slowly and surely turning this into a solid publication, with articles written by leading authors and citations in other substantial books and journals. (I was particularly happy a few years ago when a paper one of my students wrote and published in this journal was cited in Lawrence Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas.)[1] The students who worked on this issue in particular, under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Radha Thakkar, have done a tremendous job in keeping the journal publishing on a timely basis. And I hope that you, the reader, will profit from taking a look at the articles in this issue, which address a range of pressing topics in patent, copyright, international intellectual property law, and art law.

As I leave the University of Florida, I can look back with pride on the accomplishments of our faculty, both full-time and adjunct, our students, and a wonderful support group of friends and alumni without whom our program never could have flourished. But flourish it has, and with new [p.x] faculty including Elizabeth Rowe and Andrea Matwyshyn joining the law school in the fall of this year, I leave our program in capable hands. It will continue to flourish.

And continue to flourish it must, because a basic understanding of intellectual property and technology law has become increasingly important for most lawyers — and a deep knowledge important for many. I.P. and technology law issues pervade our culture, for better or worse. To cite just a few examples, as of this writing there are two important I.P. cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, one involving copyrights and file-sharing, the other the experimental use of patented inventions. [2] Congress recently held hearings on proposals to revamp our patent system in some dramatic ways.[3] I.P. has even become a major area of concern in the global arena, with questions about how best to accommodate the needs of the developing world to the global protection systems mandated by the TRIPs Agreement and the Berne Convention. [4] On a day-to-day basis, disputes involving the law of unfair competition, including trademarks and especially trade secrets, probably make up the bulk of I.P. litigation. But even unfair competition law, with its roots in common law, must adapt to a new day; disputes increasingly raise important questions of the extent to which I.P. must accommodate other important values, including free competition and freedom of speech.[5]

[p.xi] Indeed, if there is any one principle that lawyers and lawyers-in-training must always bear in mind, it is that the law — and particularly I.P. law — is constantly changing. It has to, because technology (and a world that is ever more dependent upon technology) is also constantly changing. Of course, lawmakers try to be proactive, and sometimes the lawyer’s role is to make sure that, before Congress or a state legislature or an administrative agency adopts a proactive response to a perceived problem, every relevant viewpoint is aired and considered. But lawmakers cannot foresee every contingency; nor do they always want to decide every issue in advance (and even when they do, there remains the need for constitutional oversight). Hence there remains an important role for the courts, which sometimes have to interpret obscurely written new laws, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act;[6] or to adapt older principles that were not designed with contemporary technological challenges in mind. [7] The need to understand and articulate the underlying policy issues — and to predict, as best we can, the likely consequences of interpreting statutory and common law rules in different ways — therefore becomes paramount. Just as important, lawyers and lawyers-in-training need to recognize their role as policymakers and policy-shapers. An understanding of the underlying policy issues is not merely some gilt or flourish to top off your legal education; it is the lifeblood of a body of law that is constantly in flux. Approach the study of law (and especially I.P. law) not as a cookbook, but as a continuing work-in-progress, and your intellectual satisfaction will be greater, your understanding of the law richer, and your service to clients and to the public all the more effective.

[p.xii] And that brings me, then, to my final word of advice to students — and to readers generally, for that matter. To make optimal use of the education that you (and I) have been so privileged, among all the people of the world, to receive, let me suggest two important traits that all of us need constantly to work on. The first is intellectual flexibility, that is, the ability to see the issues from different perspectives and to develop creative solutions to new problems. Often “thinking outside the box” leads nowhere, but in the small number of cases in which it leads somewhere, the dividends are beyond measure. The second is intellectual independence. Think for yourself, in other words; test the advice and recommendations of others in the light of your own experience. You may discover something that the experts have overlooked. To be sure, it is essential to do your homework, to know what others have already said about the topic at hand, and (in any sort of adversary setting) to be more prepared than the other side. There is no substitute for hard work, as Thomas Edison was wont to say. But, at the end of the day, trust your own judgment and don’t look back.

And remember to enjoy the ride.