One of my personal goals for my school career is to write a paper to contribute to an academic legal journal. Last semester I started to brainstorm and get some ideas bouncing around. This semester I continued that process and am pleased to say that I have settled on one of those ideas; at least for the time being. I have started the next step of preliminary research. Professor Jessica Myers from Akron Law, was helpful in pointing me in the right direction and giving me some nuanced ideas that I hadn’t considered exploring.

The general question that I’ve settled on is: Should Corporations that Hold Culturally Significant IP be Required to Protect them? I was joking around with a friend about a hypothetical where CEOs of media conglomerates get some sort of thrill out of crushing nostalgic childhood IP’s. The joke expanded to is there a possibility of intentional infliction of emotional distress. The idea fermented for a while and when I would mention it to people, I would get a lot of interaction with the question. Well a relatively substantial amount of interaction for a legal question. (As in their eyes did not start darting around the room looking for any possible exit of escape.)

I have plans to meet with the school’s librarian to start doing some deeper research into the subject. My next step will be to get a rough block-out and the legal points that I will want to cover. Thankfully, since this is a personal project, there are no pressing deadlines and I can work as time allows. (Time doesn’t allow in law school, but such is life.)

Until next time,

Warren Carr