FOURTH CONFERENCE OF ROMANIAN AMERICAN PROFESSIONALS
VESTED IN WEAVING SOCIAL COHESION
2nd Day, Legal Counseling and Public Policy panel, Dec. 3rd 2022
Honorary Consul General of Romania to San Francisco, Professor of Law Dana Beldiman was the featured guest of our legal counseling and public policy panel this year. With an active career straddling both sides of the Atlantic, she teaches Intellectual Property Law at University of California Hastings College of Law, in San Francisco and at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. At the law school in Hamburg she is the Founder and Academic Director of the Transnational Center for IP, Media and Technology Law and Policy.
The topic of her presentation may have gone largely unnoticed in mainstream media and even among stakeholders in research and innovation, but it is a positive development of major consequence. Romania was the last member country of the European Union to be removed from the USTR Special 301 Report which lists US trading partners that lack adequate and effective protection and enforcement of Intellectual Property rights. Romania had been on that list since 1995. Being dropped from that list is a major coup for Romanian authorities who followed the recommendations and obtained recognition for addressing all vulnerabilities that had marred the IP environment in the country for so many years. This has positive long-term implications for transatlantic economic relations allowing Romania to access advanced US technology based on mutual trust but also it is an indication of the evolution of Romania’s economy and the indigenous national research and innovation sector that has come of age and stands to benefit from national and international IP protection.