by Lanxuan Gao
I attended Harvard Summer School from July 14th to August 1st, 2025. I sincerely appreciate the financial support of Friends of UTokyo during this program.
This program was also a GLP GEfIL Abroad program, in which students are required to join a summer school or similar international program once a year. I first found Harvard Summer School in the document provided by the GLP office in UTokyo. I took the class “Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Business and Intellectual Property Law.”
There were two main purposes for this program:
1) Understand and familiarize myself with the concept of intellectual property (IP) and laws regarding it.
2) Meet PhD students in Boston to understand their situation and life.
My major at UTokyo is physics, so it might seem strange for me to take a class about IP law. This is strongly related to my dream of creating usable quantum computers for society.
Quantum computing is a state-of-the-art technology and requires intensive research and efforts. However, I have heard that in such a tech area, disputes regarding IPs often happen. One example I remember is the dispute between Nichia Corporation and Shuji Nakamura, the inventor of the blue LED. I wanted to first get familiar with the concept of IPs and the laws regarding them, which might help me, my company, and my lab in the future to avoid these kinds of conflicts.
The second purpose is about my desire to acquire a PhD degree in the US. I have been considering pursuing a PhD degree in the US for years because of its strong and superior research power and the close collaboration between industry and academia. So I thought it was a good opportunity to visit labs in person, directly asking PhD students about the environment and the research they have there. Besides, Boston has one of the greatest communities and people doing research in quantum computing, so I really wanted to see them.
Trying to achieve these two goals, my days in Boston mainly consisted of two schedules:
1.Attend the class and do assignments.
2.Meet and talk to PhD students in Boston.
Life in Boston was full of wonderfulness, comfort, passion, and new findings.
I had classes from 3–6 pm, four days a week from Monday to Thursday. The building of our classroom was somewhat separated from Harvard Yard, which is the main campus of Harvard College, but it was around a five-minute walk from the place.
Every day, we were given some readings about legal cases and basic ideas about IPs, including patent, copyright, and trademark. One of the cases that strongly impressed me was the dispute between Mark Zuckerberg and ConnectU.
In 2004, Harvard students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra sued Mark Zuckerberg, alleging he broke an oral agreement to help build their social networking site, ConnectU (originally HarvardConnection, to connect Harvard students like a dating app), and instead used their idea and code to create Facebook. Zuckerberg was just hired part-time by ConnectU then and there was no signed contract. Everything was just oral and informal. As a result, the case was settled in 2008 when Facebook agreed to pay $20 million in cash and transfer over a million shares to the plaintiffs. Obviously, they could have gotten more if they had had a formal contract. This was a good example for me to remember that it is always important to have formal documents when creating any kind of IP. Besides, what made this case more interesting to me is the fact that it just happened at Harvard. It turned out that the plaintiffs actually gave a complaint to Harvard originally, which was rejected by Harvard. This case later also resulted in a more detailed rule about IP at Harvard.
There was also a mock trial at the end of the course. Students were divided into groups to represent an individual or the lawyers of the individual in a copyright infringement case. All the groups were given documents about the general information of the case and some evidence, e.g., the defendant’s diary, network history, and computer disk history. However, there was not direct evidence of an illegal download of songs by the defendant. The process of the trial was like a detective story. We were required to discover who downloaded them with only a limited amount of information. This also impressed me, as it showed that it is sometimes very difficult to prove an infringement.
Other than the class, I had the opportunity to visit labs in Harvard and MIT. Boston is highly renowned for the research of cold atom systems, an area of physics ideal for quantum computers. I could meet more than ten PhD students there. I asked them mainly about their research and, especially important now, funding. Funding cuts are a serious problem for many universities in the US now, especially in Harvard, so I was very fortunate to be able to hear the real situation in person. These experiences definitely help me refine the plan for my future.
Achieving these two goals, I am now confident that I am able to achieve my goal of creating quantum computers usable in real society. Again, I express my greatest gratitude to Friends of UTokyo, who helped make my dream come true.
