Smart contracts and intellectual property law

The course aims to enable students to achieve:
- the ability to frame legal issues pertaining to smart contracts;
- the improvement of the technical language;
- the ability to link the various topics for the solution of concrete cases, also through case-based lessons conducted with the active participation of students;
- knowledge of the main concepts related to blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, and their applications to smart contracts,
- the ability to manage intellectual property (IP) and to query IP databases.

At the end of the course, students will have acquired a method of reasoning suitable for dealing with legal issues in highly innovative and rapidly evolving technological contexts. In addition, students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the working of smart contracts based on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, to demonstrate understanding of the main concepts related to IP management, to demonstrate knowledge of different data sources for IP management, and to demonstrate understanding of how to query different IP databases.