Q & A with Betsy Rosenblatt

One of the most exciting things about intellectual property law is that it is difficult to predict where the law will go. In the 1980s, when the Supreme Court addressed the legality of television time-shifting in the landmark case of Sony v. Universal, we never imagined that it would pave the way for the cultural juggernaut of TiVo. Twenty years ago — when e-mail was a rarity and the Internet as we know it simply did not exist — we could not have anticipated the cultural and legal impact of far-off technologies like YouTube and Napster. The only thing about which we can be certain is that the future will hold new, unpredictable challenges to our current understanding of intellectual property law — which makes the field all the more exciting.