BACKGROUND

David Olson joined the Boston College law faculty in 2007.  Prior to that he was Resident Fellow for two years at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. At Stanford his activities included successfully litigating the fair use and copyright misuse case of Shloss v. Estate of James Joyce, No. C 06-3718 JW (N.D. Cal. 2007),  and successfully defending musician BT in the copyright infringement (sampling) case of Vargas v. Pfizer, et al., No. 04 Civ. 9772 WHP (S.D. N.Y. 2007). Prior to that, Professor Olson was an intellectual property litigator at Kirkland and Ellis LLP in New York and then in San Francisco. While at Kirkland, Professor Olson primarily litigated patent cases in the areas of business methods, software, silicon chips, biotechnology, and mechanical devices such as casino card shufflers.  Professor Olson also did some work on trademark and unfair competition cases.

From 2000-2001, Professor Olson clerked for the Honorable Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Houston, Texas. 

Professor Olson received his B.A. with distinction and honors in economics from the University of Kansas in 1997 and his J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2000.

Professor Olson is admitted to the bars of New York and California, and to various federal courts including the Federal Circuit.

Professor Olson’s primary research and teaching interests include patent law, intellectual property law generally, and antitrust.


EDUCATION

B.A., University of Kansas; J.D., Harvard University.

RECENT ACTIVITIES

Works in Progress: 
Towards a First Amendment Grounding for Copyright Misuse; Patentable Subject Matter: The Problem of the Absent Gatekeeper (available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=933167)

Presentations:
Speaker, 7th Annual Intellectual Property Scholars Conference, hosted by DePaul University College of Law, August 9-10, 2007 (Presenting Towards a First Amendment Foundation for Copyright Misuse).  Program website.

Invited Speaker, The 2007 North American James Joyce Conference, The University of Texas at Austin, June 13-17, 2007 (Presenting Shloss v. Joyce and the Case for Expanded Copyright Misuse).  Program website.

Invited Commentator, Workshop on Commons Theory for Young Scholars, Sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and the Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School, Bonn, Germany, May 7-9, 2007. Program website.

Participant, The Seventeenth Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, Montreal, Canada, May 1-4, 2007.  Program website.

Invited Speaker, State of Play Academy, October 10, 2006 (Presented Patentable Subject Matter: The Problem of the Absent Gatekeeper in the virtual world of There.com).  Program website.

Other Activities: 
Non-resident fellow, Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

COURSES

Fall '07: Intellectual Property Survey
Spring '08: Patent Law