Lecture Series named for Peter Jaszi, Honoring Public Service

We are proud to join in the celebration of the newly inaugurated Peter Jaszi Distinguished Lecture in Intellectual Property at the Washington College of Law, with a lecture by Chris Sprigman on the “knockoff economy” on November 1.  

The Distinguished Lecture is being named for Prof. Jaszi, a long-time collaborator on fair use projects at the Center for Social Media, “in recognition of the extraordinary ongoing contributions of Professor Peter Jaszi to the study of intellectual property at American University Washington College of Law and in the world at large, and in particular for his lasting contributions to the elevation of the public interest as the paramount concern of the law.”

This is a much-deserved honor. Prof. Peter Jaszi is a legal scholar who researches with the skills of an anthropologist, empathically and non-judgmentally grasping the cultural, social and psychological dimensions of the problem he’s investigating.

He also serves as an advocate and activist, taking on issues that can nurture and encourage a more democratic culture, one where creativity can burble up from anywhere and freedom of expression is something people not only know about but are confident they can exercise. 

And he is a lawyer, relentlessly looking for the strategic angles to make the law more useable for an open society.  

His leadership on the balancing features of copyright is so important because those features empower users and new creators to be able to draw freely from a copyrighted culture.

His work on fair use, which he described in the co-authored book Reclaiming Fair Use, pioneered the highly effective and reliable approach of creating best-practices documents that create better understanding of the law, a more sure-footed reasoning process, and a greater awareness of the freedom-of-expression issues involved.

Peter Jaszi’s good work has often gone unsung. He has often worked with Congress, happy to have the Congressional members and staffers get the credit and attention. He has enabled librarians, artists, teachers and filmmakers to do their work better, without putting his personal stamp on the codes of practice that liberate them. His legal support has been particularly important to disabled communities. So it is especially welcome to see his name be put on an ongoing series that showcases the public-purpose implications of intellectual property policy.

His clear vision of how the law can serve culture instead of stifling it deserves enduring recognition.