As Intellectual Property and Information Privacy become ever more entangled Maryland Carey Law’s Intellectual Property Program is pleased to welcome Professor Daniel Rauch to the faculty. Rauch will teach our Information Privacy Law course and he kindly sat down for an interview with us to share his experiences at Maryland Carey Law and his insights on the relationship between Information Privacy and Intellectual Property.
Welcome to Maryland Carey Law. We’re excited to have you here! How has it been so far?
I’m so excited to be part of the Carey Law community! I’m especially impressed by the collegial and supportive culture among both students and faculty, and the willingness of everyone to debate, engage with, and disagree about big ideas without being disagreeable. I can’t wait to see what this academic year will bring!
What sparked your interest in teaching Information Privacy Law (IPL)?
Because it’s a new and fast-evolving field, it requires command of many different areas: common law torts, federal statutes, state regulations, and, of course, comfort with international regulations (like the European Union’s GDPR). Because of this, in addition to being intellectual fascinating, I think it also will be a great way to reinforce how different types of law and different regulatory systems can reinforce — or undermine — one another.
Can you describe your work as “a data privacy and cybersecurity practitioner”?
Sure; in private practice, my work included advising and counseling clients on the data privacy implications of proposed new products (to take a fictionalized example: something like a company asking us what the privacy law ramifications of a GPS-tracking dog collar would be, and whether it might implicate any privacy regulations). I also assisted companies in privacy due diligence, such as evaluating, in the context of mergers and acquisitions, what privacy-law liabilities an acquiring company might take on — if you buy the data, you buy the problems with that data!
What’s the link between IPL and Intellectual Property (IP)?
Both IPL and IP are about information control and information access. Because of this, there’s a good deal of overlapping ground. To take just one example: many major social media companies have been pressed to provide algorithmic transparency to ensure, among other things, that they are respectful of users’ privacy. But they have often responded on the theory that such information is proprietary IP, and that therefore they needn’t disclose it. This is just one intersection, but there are definitely others.
Why should students take IPL and why is IPL important today?
I can think of (at least) three major reasons: first, the questions that are involved in IPL, from what separates “public” from “private,” to how information influences and is influenced by power, are some of the deepest and most fundamental in the law. Second, because in our current moment, these ancient debates are at the core of some of the most important modern ones: from digital government surveillance to social media regulation to the promise and peril of AI. And third, in terms of practice and career opportunities, it’s an extraordinary growth area: any company, government agency, or law firm is going to have more and more engagement with privacy laws and regulation, and so it’s an area that is going to be in increasing demand as time goes on.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
It’s an honor to be here at Maryland Carey Law, and I’m looking forward to teaching students about privacy law next term!