[2] Brown was also a recognized expert in legal rights and issues relating to defamation, privacy, and publicity.
He was appointed to the Yale law faculty in 1946 after returning from naval service in World War II.
Brown was a member of the national board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1955 to 1991 and served on its executive committee, 1970-1974 and 1986-1990.
[5] One of the basic themes in Brown's writing was the importance to consumers of not letting intellectual property protection expand too far into what had been the public domain, in the name of suppressing "free riders."
In a 1986 paper he gave on "the kind of free-riding that both arouses moral indignation in some people, and arguably saps the initiative of innovators," he examined the difficulties of the various proposed solutions and suggested: The fourth possibility is to do nothing.