The European Union and the United States, the world’s leaders in the fields of innovation and high technology, share a common set of values based on a commitment to democracy, human rights, market economics, and the rule of law. But EU and US approaches to many technology related issues in law and policy differ significantly, causing barriers to trade across the Atlantic and legal uncertainty within the Transatlantic Marketplace, which comprises 450 million people in the EU and 330 million people in the US.

Funded by a generous grant from the Microsoft Corporation, the Transatlantic Technology Law Forum (TTLF) aims to promote a balanced approach to today’s and future transatlantic tech law issues and to focus scholarly attention on these issues by involving academics, businesspeople, government officials, legal professionals, legislators, policy makers, representatives of international organisations, scholars, students and the public at large from both sides of the Atlantic. The Transatlantic Technology Law Forum’s institutional framework is co-sponsored and operated by the Stanford Law School Program in Law, Science & Technology and the University of Vienna School of Law, which established TTLF jointly in a transatlantic academic partnership in 2004. The Transatlantic Technology Law Forum serves as a coordinating and working platform for a series of institutionally open transatlantic tech law projects. A number of American and European universities and other academic institutions as well as international organisations are actively involved in TTLF projects.

It is the Transatlantic Technology Law Forum’s objective to raise professional understanding and public awareness of transatlantic challenges in the field of law, science and technology, as well as to support policy-oriented research on transatlantic issues in the field. TTLF engages in three basic types of activities:

• Education: TTLF actively promotes the exchange of knowledge. We educate US lawyers and policymakers on EU technology law as well as educating European lawyers and policymakers on US technology law. International understanding is necessary in order to promote successful and knowledge-based work on transatlantic tech law issues.
• Research: TTLF is dedicated to basic and advanced comparative research on EU-US technology law and policy issues and to the transatlantic exchange of ideas regarding these issues.
• Policy orientied activities: TTLF is a transatlantic technology law & policy thinktank in the context of the New Transatlantic Agenda and the emerging idea of a Transatlantic Free Trade Area. We emphasize initiatives that aim to provide constructive and innovative solutions to EU-US technology law and policy challenges by providing recommendations to the European Commission and the US government, and by ultimately establishing a deeper and better informed “Transatlantic Technology Law Dialogue”.

The Transatlantic Technology Law Forum’s operations are concentrated on five priority areas:

• antitrust law
• biotechnology law
• information technology law
• intellectual property law
• nanotechnology law

Key elements of TTLF activities include conferences, seminars, workshops, meetings, research projects, courses, joint study programs, summer schools, continuing education programs, a news section and a comprehensive collection of EU and US technology law.