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Law professor Yolanda M. King to take copyright law ‘Outside the Box’

August 18, 2015
Yolanda King

Yolanda King

Yolanda M. King, an associate professor in the NIU College of Law, will speak Friday, Oct. 2, as a panelist during a copyright symposium at Columbia Law School.

Called “Copyright: Outside the Box,” the symposium is part of an annual series of copyright symposia hosted by the Columbia Law School’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts.

“There’s not a lot of literature out there on tattoos,” said Pippa Almond, one of the organizers of the Columbia Law School symposium. “Yolanda is one of the few scholars who has explored it in an academic manner.”

Recently profiled in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, in a feature article titled “NIU Professor Becomes Expert on IP Tattoo Law,” King has become a “go-to” resource for her thought leadership in the areas of intellectual property law and entertainment law. She has written two articles on whether tattoos can be copyrighted and the enforcement of tattoo copyright.

A third article, set for publication this spring in the Nevada Law Journal, takes it a step further.

“My third article assumes that there are enforceable copyrights,” King said, “but if the tattoo is on the body of a celebrity, then the tattoo-bearer may have a right of publicity claim independent of the tattoo artist’s copyright claim.”

After receiving her J.D. from Harvard University, King practiced intellectual property law at Husch Blackwell Sanders Welsh & Katz and Brinks Hofer Gilson & Lione in Chicago, where she engaged in domestic and international copyright and trademark prosecution, handled licensing issues and represented clients in domain name matters. In addition, she served as an attorney in the City of Chicago Department of Law.

Professor King is currently “of counsel” at Advitam IP, an intellectual property law firm in Chicago.

She is a member of the Intellectual Property Law Association of Chicago, International Trademark Association and Society for American Law Teachers. In 2009, she received the 2009 Corporate Woman of Achievement Award from the National Association of Women Business Owners.