Maps of Intellectual Property

version 3.0

last updated: January 24, 2013

Copyright Law

Patent Law

Trademark Law

Theories of Intellectual Property

These four maps contain overviews of the principal fields of intellectual property law. The maps do not aspire to be treatises; they are not comprehensive, and some of the interpretations they offer of current legal doctrine are controversial. Rather, they are designed to be used as teaching aids. To that end, they attempt to describe and organize the main rules in each field, paying particular attention to significant recent developments and to especially controversial or unstable issues.

How to use one of these maps:

• You should begin by downloading the file containing the map to your computer. There are two ways to do this:
  • Option #1: Download the file directly from this page. If you have a Windows-based personal computer, you do this by "right clicking" on the title of the map. If you have a Apple computer, you do this by holding down the "Control" key on your keyboard, then clicking on the title of the map, then selecting "download linked file."
  • Option #2: Simply click on the title of the map. A blank screen will appear on your computer. Move your cursor to the bottom of the page. A pull-up menu will appear, offering you various choices, including "Open PDF in Preview" and "Download PDF." Select the latter.
• Once you have downloaded the file, you may wish to move it to a convenient directory in your hard drive.
• Open the file using the Adobe Acrobat software program. (If you try to open the file using another program, such as "Preview," it probably will not work. Most computers contain Adobe Acrobat. If yours does not, you can obtain it for free from http://get.adobe.com/reader/.
• To expand and contract the branches of each map, click on the "+" and "-" buttons.
• The icons that look like sections of chain provide links (not surprisingly) to other documents. Some of those documents consist of statutes or judicial opinions; others are slide presentations that examine cases or doctrines in more detail. Once you have explored one of those collateral documents to your satisfaction, close the browser window to return to the main map.

The maps and all of the collateral slide presentations are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike 2.5 License, the terms of which are available here.

In preparing and updating the maps, I received enormous help from June Casey and Karen Storin Linitz of the Harvard Law School Library, Andrew Moshirnia, a Harvard Law School student with a deep background in educational technology, and Ken Hirschman, General Counsel of Mindjet -- the company that generously supplied the Mindmanager software and Catalyst subscriptions that were used to create and share the maps.

If you make use of these materials and find flaws in them -- errors that need to be corrected, gaps that need to be filled, or references to rules that have been superceded -- I would be grateful if you would let me know. It's best to send me such suggestions via email: tfisher@law.harvard.edu. Please use the words "IP Maps" in the subject line.

William Fisher

tfisher.org