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The Transatlantic Technology Law Forum - The “Go-to" Place in Transatlantic Technology Law Print E-mail
bridges vol. 13, April 2007 / Feature Article
by Barbara Schultze


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The EU's antitrust case against Microsoft and its implications for Silicon Valley companies is only one of the diverse legal issues being tackled by the Transatlantic Technology Law Forum (TTLF). Looking from both US and EU perspectives, the TTLF is also
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Stanford Law School
examining the patenting of software, data protection and the Internet, labeling of genetically modified organisms, securitization of intellectual property (IP) in the nanosciences, space law and other technology law issues.

The TTLF was jointly established in 2004 by the Stanford Law School Program in Law, Science & Technology and the University of Vienna School of Law as a transatlantic academic partnership. It works in three fields: education, research, and policy-oriented activities.

It currently focuses on five legal priority areas: intellectual property law, information technology (IT) law, biotechnology law, nanotechnology law, and space law, with a sixth field, competition law, to be added shortly.

bridges spoke with two of the TTLF's co-directors, Dr. Siegfried Fina , Associate Professor of European Union Law and Technology Law at the University of Vienna School of Law and Dr. Roland Vogl, Executive Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology .

bridges: What is the primary objective of the collaboration between the Stanford Law School and the University of Vienna School of Law?
Roland Vogl: We thought that we needed to build a platform that would foster and promote mutual understanding, where we
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Roland Vogl
can educate European lawyers about US technology law and vice versa. We also want to be the "go-to" place for decision makers on both sides of the Atlantic who are overwhelmed with the complexity of the issues in harmonizing technology law. To boil it down to the key point, it's to promote mutual understanding and to do cutting-edge research, helping to reduce many of the transaction costs that we face in this area due to differing approaches and misunderstandings on both sides of the Atlantic.

Siegfried Fina: My experience as a law professor in Europe is that we have many conferences and research projects just dealing with European legal issues. But there is a huge transatlantic marketplace for US and European companies now covering almost 500 million people in the EU and about 300 million people in the US, and we don't have enough understanding about the other side. We feel that's a real gap we should fill.

bridges: How did the collaboration come about?

Vogl: Everything went back to a conference we had at the Center for Law and the Biosciences in 2004. We had just established that center, and as the kick-off event we had a conference on "Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis." As I was going through the list of participants I saw somebody from the University of Vienna who had signed up, Prof. Fina. At the conference we had a conversation, and since we were interested in the same areas of the law we said we should do something to address all these open transatlantic tech law questions. That was the starting moment for the collaboration.

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