Microsoft Donates One Million Dollars to Boalt

Microsoft Corp. announced Tuesday that it will donate $1 million to the Boalt Hall School of Law over the next four years to fund legal research on technology.

The donation will annually distribute $250,000 to Boalt's Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, $100,000 of which will be used to support the research of faculty and scholars at the law school.

The remaining $150,000 will be funneled into the Microsoft Fellows program in law technology to fund one post-graduate student researcher each year for the next 10 years.

"This collaboration will enable our employees to discuss important issues facing the technology industry with some of the most respected researchers in the world," said Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel for Microsoft, in a statement.

About two projects proposed by faculty of the center or by affiliated scholars will be sponsored each year. The selection will be by agreement between the center's faculty and Microsoft every spring to discuss the current issues most important for research.

Boalt professors and center co-directors Robert Merges and Pamela Samuelson have been selected to use funds to pursue their research for the 2005-06 term.

"It's a chance for some of our ideas to get a little further in the policy process with Microsoft being interested," Samuelson said.

The research may be used to help guide American policy in the fields of technology and legal rights over intellectual property, she said.

Samuelson's research will explore the impact of a decision in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, which held that developers of technologies with substantial non-infringing uses could not be held liable for copyright infringement.

Merges cofounded the center in 1995, consolidating resources at the law school to meet the growing interest in high-technology law.

Merges, an expert in patent law, is zeroing in on patent "trolls"-people who register patents for products they never intend to make, only to sue others for infringement when they invent a similar product.

Samuelson's project will center on the liability of technology developers and their role in acts of infringement.

Current copyright laws do not directly address violations in secondary liability and have brought issues of peer-to-peer sharing into question, she said.

Samuelson said the financial backing from Microsoft and the appointment of new leadership of the center are signs that there has been increased attention to the center's research.

The center tapped Robert Barr, vice president of intellectual property and worldwide patent counsel for Cisco Systems, as executive director in earlier this month, effective July 1.

Microsoft's donation, Samuelson said, is "a sign that the investment in the Berkeley Center of Law and Technology is beginning to bear fruit."

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