The 15th Annual Workshop of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) will be hosted by Boston University School of Law at Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
We will explore themes connected to problems related to global environmental changes related to human-centered domination of the planet. The concept is not without controversy – when it began, its obfuscation of differences among humans with diverging claims and impacts, its embedded human-nature dualism. These questions, and the roles of technological changes, industrialization and capitalism, as well as contested views on “progress” anchor debates about our planet in climate crisis. We are especially interested in papers that explore historical and contemporary manifestations of these themes, as well as others. Please refer to the full call for papers.
To be considered for the workshop, please submit a 300-word abstract of your proposed paper as well as a one-paragraph bio and 2-page CV by January 8, 2024 by email to:jsilbey@bu.edu.
Machines of Law and Intellectual Property as Legal Machinery.
DAY 1
20 June 2022
BST 12.00-12.15; CET 13:00-13:15; EST 7.00-7.15; PST 7.00-7.15; AEST 21.00-21.15 Welcome, Organisers.
BST 12.15-13.00; CET 13:15-14:00; EST 7.15-8.00; AEST 21.15-22.00 Devaluing Trademarks in an AI Driven Marketplace, Christine Haight Farley. Commentator: Marc Stuhldreier. Chair: Matilda Arvidsson.
Break
BST 13.15-14.00; CET 14:15-15:00; EST 8.15-9.00; PST 5.15-6.00; AEST 22.15-23.00 Human Labour and AI Creativity: Beyond the Author/Tool Dichotomy, Kristofer Erickson. Commentator: Ulf Petrusson. Chair: Véronique Pouillard.
Break
BST 14.15- 15.45; CET 15:15-16:45; EST 9.15-10.45; PST 6.00-7.45; AEST 23.00-00.45 Technologies of Peace: Enemy Patents, Custodial Functions, and the Interwar Construction of Security, Anna Saunders.
UNESCO on the Stage: UNESCO and Algerian Performers Approaching the Rome Convention, Minja Mitrovic.
Chair: Shane Burke.
16:45-17:45 Mingle event.
Day 2
21 JUNE 2022
BST 8.15-9.00; CET 9:15-10:00; EST 3.15-4.00 PST 0.15-1.00; AEST 17.15-18.00 Artefactual history of copyright’s subject matter, Ewa Laskowska-Litak. Commentator: Kathy Bowrey. Chair: Martin Fredriksson.
Break
BST 9.15-10.00; CET 10:15-11:00; EST 4.15-5.00; PST 1.15-2.00; AEST 18.15-19.00
Hovering between institutions: Negotiating bureaucracies and the harmonization of intellectual property in a European context, Marius Buning. Commentator: Fiona Macmillan. Chair: Merima Bruncevic.
Break
BST 10.15-11.00; CET 11:15-12:00; EST 5.15-6.00; PST 2.15-3.00; AEST 19.15-20.00 Replicability Crisis and Intellectual Property Law, Ofer Tur-Sinai & Or Cohen Sasson. Commentator: Gabriel Galvez-Behar. Chair: Frantzeska Papadopoulou.
Lunch
BST 12.30-13.15; CET 13:30-14:15; EST 7.30-8.15; PST 4.30-5.15; AEST 21.30-22.15 Inking IP: Tattoo Machines & Law-Making, Melanie Stockton-Brown. Commentator: Jeanne Fromer. Chair: José Bellido.
BST 13.15-14.00; CET 14:15-15:00; EST 8.15-9.00; PST 5.15-6.00; AEST 22.15-23.00 Machines, surveillance and forced labour, Johanna Dahlin. Commentator: Stina Teilmann Lock. Chair: Kara Swanson.
Break
BST 14.15-15.45; CET 15:15-16:45; EST 9.15-10.45; PST 6.15-7.45; AEST 23.15-00.45 Emergent Spaces of the Mechanical Author: Ernst Krenek and Interwar Mechanical-Musical Rights, Johan Larson Lindal.
Looming Questions: Could an Indian Weaver Patent a Loom in the Early-Twentieth, Subhadeep Chowdhury.
Chair: Marta Iljadica.
BST 16.00-17.00; CET 17:00-18:00; EST 11.00-12.00; PST 8.00-9.00; AEST 1.00-2.00 Governing board only, Board meeting.
19:00 Dinner.
Day 3
22 June 2022
BST 9.00-9.45; CET 10:00-10:45; EST 4.00-4.45; PST 1.00-1.45; AEST 18.00-18.45 The Machinery of Creation. Oulipo Poetry, Copyright & Rules of Constraint, Kathy Bowrey and Janet Chan. Commentator: Eva Hemmungs Wirtén. Chair: Marius Buning.
Break
BST 10.00-11.30; CET 11:00-12:30; EST 5.00-6.30; PST 2.00-3.30; AEST 19.00-20.30 The voice and the machine: Performing music and theatre on the early radio (1921-1928), Anna Marie Skråmestø Nesheim.
Towards Innovations in Intellectual Property Studies: Using Topic Modeling to Explore the Limits of Copyright Law, Jamaica Jones.
Chair: Hyo Yoon Kang.
BST 11.40-12.15; CET 12:40-13:15; EST 6.40-7.15; PST 3.40-4.15; AEST 20.40-21.15 Closing remarks, Organisers/Ulf Petrusson.
The workshop is hosted by Merima Bruncevic and the Center for Intellectual Property at the Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Machines of Law and Intellectual Property as Legal Machinery
20-22 June 2022
The 13th Annual Workshop of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) will be hosted by Center for Intellectual Property at the Department of Law, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
The workshop will have a hybrid form, meaning we will cater for both physical and online participation.
We are going to be exploring themes connected to machines in and of law, specifically how law in general, and intellectual property law in particular, can be, and are, affected by machines and by machinic agencies. Machines and machinery resonate across the IP spectrum and across disciplines, from early modern innovations to the contemporary challenges of artificial intelligence. We are especially interested in papers that explore historical and contemporary connotations that encourage disciplinary self-reflexivity and conversations. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged, particularly with respect to:
legal subjecthood e.g. technologically augmented human beings as well as non-human, less-than-human and more-than-human agencies;
materialities e.g. legal classification, administration, properties;
practices e.g. creative and scientific, information management, knowledge circulation, sharing; and
conceptions ofrights and domain e.g. IP Constitutionalism, private power etc.
We invite participants to discuss how machines have influenced and challenged regulation over time. It could both be a matter of exploring contemporary challenges to law, speculative or artistic approaches or responses to machine regulation, as well as historical and theoretical discussions on the broad theme of law and machines. We particularly invite contributions on:
creation: e.g. automatic cultural production and invention
immaterial labour: e.g. immaterial machinic production, decision making and creativity
agency: e.g. machinic rights, responsibility and sustainability, artificial intelligence
jurisdiction: e.g. decentralisation, territoriality, smart or technologically intensified spaces
law as machine: e.g. systemic boundaries, ontologies of IP law, convergences of public and private regulation
social engineering in the service of IP objectives: e.g. public goals and constitutionalism, dehumanisation of decision-making, trolls, bots, etc.
Guidelines for contributors
We welcome papers from all academic disciplines. Papers that address this call from an historical, artistic or theoretical perspective are particularly welcomed, as are contributions from scholars working across disciplines or using speculative and alternative methods. Established and junior scholars are encouraged to submit papers.
Proposers should be aware that authors (except for PhD students) do not present their own papers at ISHTIP workshops. Rather, a discussant, normally from a discipline other than the home discipline of the author, presents a brief summary and critique of papers to facilitate a more interdisciplinary discussion and build scholarly discourse across disciplines.
To allow this, complete papers must be submitted by 10 May 2022. The papers should not have been previously published.
To be considered for the workshop, please submit a 300-word abstract of your proposed paper as well as a one-paragraph bio and 2-page CV by 30 January 2022 by email to: merima.bruncevic@law.gu.se
Important dates
Date for Submission of proposals:30 January 2022
Expected Date for notification of acceptance: 10 March 2022
2018 marks the tenth anniversary of the establishment of ISHTIP, which held its first workshop in the Stationers’ Hall in London in March 2008. The Stationers Hall, with its special place in intellectual property law and history, seemed an appropriate place to kick off an interdisciplinary society with a particular focus on the interaction of those two disciplines. Ten years on, ISHTIP has deepened its interdisciplinary engagement providing a forum for an array of new disciplinary and critical theoretical perspectives. Influenced by the idea of reflecting on the heritage of ISHTIP itself, and inspired by its location in a city that has a special place in the canon of Western heritage, this year’s workshop invites proposals for papers on the relationship between forms of intellectual property and heritage. The concept of heritage, despite being vaguely defined in law – or perhaps because of this – is part of a rhetorical moving feast in political and cultural discourse. Not only does its apparent subject matter often overlap with the subject matter of intellectual property, it also shares many of the problematic tropes of intellectual property. These include, but are not limited to, matters such as its strongly occidental flavour located in an ordering of knowledge that claims to be universal, its apparently constitutive relationship with social understandings of concepts like culture and innovation, and its uncertain relationship with concepts of im/materiality and in/tangibility. Like intellectual property, it is also characterised by the wide range of disciplinary perspectives that it has attracted. In other ways it is profoundly different. One of the significant differences in the present context is that as an area of study it has, so far, been subject to less colonization by legal scholars. We hope, therefore, that this will generate a particularly rich interdisciplinary exchange in Rome in July 2018.
Proposals for papers that address this call from a historical or theoretically informed perspective are invited from scholars working across the disciplines. Proposers should be aware that authors do not present their own papers at ISHTIP workshops. Instead, a commentator presents a brief summary and critique to initiate the general discussion of each paper. This means that if a proposal is accepted then a written paper must be submitted by the date indicated below.
Proposals for papers should be no more than one page long, accompanied by a two page cv, and addressed to fionaelizabeth.macmillan@uniroma3.it
Date for submission of proposals: 16 February 2018
Expected date for notification of acceptance: 2 March 2018
International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property
9th Annual Workshop
CILP & the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada
July 12-14, 2017
‘Intellectual Property as Circulation and Control’
CALL FOR PAPERS
This year’s workshop will seek to explore all aspects of the circulation/control dilemma from historical and/or contemporary perspectives. Modalities of control that might be considered include: licensing practices; distribution and business models; collectivization; cultural appropriation; authors, inventors and ownership; criminal provisions; international trade agreements; technological means of control such as technological protection measures, anti-circumvention laws, search engines and aggregators; surveillance and policing by law enforcement agencies, ISPs, trolls; and organized resistance to corporate control by users and pirate movements.
The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy is pleased to partner with the Intercontinental Hotel to offer workshop participants a special rate of $229.00 (plus taxes and fees). The rate is available until June 12, 2017, or until supplies last! Simply select “Book Now” in the upper right-hand corner, enter the workshop dates, and you will be taken to a page with our special group rate (GW9).
In 2016, ISHTIP will be hosted by CREATe, the RCUK Copyright Centre, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Scotland was the home of booksellers such as Alexander Donaldson who sought to resist the monopolistic practices of their established London-based rivals, in the so-called Battle of the Booksellers of the eighteenth century. The patriotic Scottish booksellers, newcomers to the trade, sold cheap reprints of books sold by the London booksellers, including those in which statutory copyright, under the Statute of Anne 1710, had expired. The London booksellers responded with a series of lawsuits culminating in Donaldson v. Becket(1774), relying inter alia on copyright at common law, against which the Scots resisted. As Donaldson expressed in petitioning the House of Commons in 1774: ‘your petitioner has had to struggle with the united force of almost all the eminent booksellers of London and Westminster… above one hundred of the most opulent booksellers… have in their turn, been plaintiffs against your petitioner’. The resulting cases and more general debate about the nature of literary property are today remembered as a historic occasion on which the nature of copyright, as well as the more general notion of property in intangibles, was fully debated.
Taking the theme of ‘resistance’ as its starting point, we intend the 8th Annual Workshop to be a further occasion for the full debate of the theory and history of intellectual property!
The Call for Papers
In autumn 2015, we published a Call for Papers inviting abstracts for papers exploring the theme of resistance in the broadest sense, in relation to any aspect of the history or theory of intellectual property law, in particular, but not limited to: historical or theoretical research that provides a basis for resisting dominant conceptions of IP law, its theory or history, or resisting claims relating to its timelessness or universality; historical or theoretical papers exploring IP law as empowering resistance to dominant social or cultural norms or relations of social power; historical or theoretical research into local diversity in IP laws (legislative, judicial and/or bureaucratic approaches) resisting moves towards international, imperial or regional harmonisation; historical and theoretical insights into modes of resistance to IP law, its enforcement and/or its exploitation. We sought a broad representation of international scholars as well as scholars from across the disciplines, addressing any aspect of intellectual property law from a historical or theoretically-informed perspective. Both established and junior scholars were encouraged to submit abstracts. We requested that papers be unpublished and not accepted/under consideration for publication elsewhere, as it is expected that the best papers will be published in a special issue of an academic peer-reviewed journal or an edited collection.
The Workshop Programme
The accepted papers are set out in the draft programme. As arrangements are still in progress, we reserve the right to make small changes to the programme. Authors do not present their papers at ISHTIP workshops. Instead, a commentator presents a brief summary and critique to initiate the general discussion of each paper. The name of the commentator for each paper is also indicated in the draft programme.
Registration and Cost
The Workshop is open to scholars and students of any academic discipline. To register your attendance, please do so through our Eventbrite page which can be accessed here.
The conference fee is £80, which includes the cost of the conference dinner at Trades Hall. CREATe are operating a bursary scheme for unfunded applicants for whom the fee may present an obstacle to attending the conference. For further details please contact us at ishtip@create.ac.uk
Accommodation
The Workshop will take place on the main university campus, close to the School of Law (The Square, Glasgow, G12 8QQ). The hotel we recommend is the Hilton Grosvenor, Grosvenor Terrace, G12 0TA. We have asked the Hilton to hold some rooms for conference attendees (under ISHTIP2016, University of Glasgow). The rate to be offered is £155 single occupancy (£10 extra person supplement). You can book rooms at the Hilton here using the promo code ‘GISHT’. Reservations need to be made before 31 May!
Another option is The Grand Central Hotel, 99 Gordon Street, Glasgow, G1 3SF – guests to call 0141 240 3700 or email grandcentral.reservations@principal-hayley.com in order to make their reservations here. Again we have a room allocation. Please quote ISHTIP2016, University of Glasgow. Prices vary per day between £140-£180 for single occupancy.
You can find other options on-line (e.g. through airbnb, Expedia, Booking.com etc.)
Questions
If you have any further questions, please write to Dr Elena Cooper at: ishtip@create.ac.uk
International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property
8th Annual Workshop
CREATe, University of Glasgow, UK
July 6-8, 2016
‘Intellectual Property and Resistance’
CALL FOR PAPERS
In 2016, ISHTIP comes to Scotland, the home of booksellers such as Alexander Donaldson who sought to resist the monopolistic practices of their established London-based rivals, in the so-called Battle of the Booksellers of the eighteenth century. The patriotic Scottish booksellers, newcomers to the trade, sold cheap reprints of books sold by the London booksellers, including those in which statutory copyright, under the Statute of Anne 1710, had expired. The London booksellers responded with a series of lawsuits culminating in Donaldson v. Becket (1774), relying inter alia on copyright at common law, against which the Scots resisted. As Donaldson expressed in petitioning the House of Commons in 1774: ‘your petitioner has had to struggle with the united force of almost all the eminent booksellers of London and Westminster… above one hundred of the most opulent booksellers… have in their turn, been plaintiffs against your petitioner’. The resulting cases and more general debate about the nature of literary property are today remembered as a historic occasion on which the nature of copyright, as well as the more general notion of property in intangibles, was fully debated.
Taking the theme of ‘resistance’ as its starting point, we intend the 8th Annual Workshop to be a further occasion for the full debate of the theory and history of intellectual property! We invite abstracts for papers, exploring the theme of resistance in the broadest sense, in relation to any aspect of the history or theory of intellectual property law, in particular, but not limited to: historical or theoretical research that provides a basis for resisting dominant conceptions of IP law, its theory or history, or resisting claims relating to its timelessness or universality; historical or theoretical papers exploring IP law as empowering resistance to dominant social or cultural norms or relations of social power; historical or theoretical research into local diversity in IP laws (legislative, judicial and/or bureaucratic approaches) resisting moves towards international, imperial or regional harmonisation; historical and theoretical insights into modes of resistance to IP law, its enforcement and/or its exploitation.
We seek a broad representation of international scholars as well as scholars from across the disciplines. Papers may concern trade marks, patents, copyright, or related rights, including confidentiality and trade secrecy, and they may be historical or address current issues from a theoretically-informed perspective. Both established and junior scholars are encouraged to submit abstracts. We are keen to receive abstracts from those who have not recently presented at an ISHTIP workshop, particularly scholars who did not present at ISHTIP 2015.
To be considered for the workshop, please submit a 300-word abstract of your proposed paper as well as a one-paragraph bio and 2-page CV by 15 January 2016 to ishtip@create.ac.uk . Acceptance will be notified by 15 March 2016.
Complete papers (of max. 9000 words) will be due on 1 June 2016 so that they may be distributed in advance to registered workshop participants. Papers must be unpublished and not accepted/under consideration for publication elsewhere. It is expected that the best papers will be published in a special issue of an academic peer-reviewed journal or an edited collection.
Authors do not present their papers at ISHTIP workshops. Instead, a discussant presents a brief summary and critique to initiate the general discussion of each paper. All panels are plenary. ISHTIP workshops are thus a great venue for presenting and receiving feedback on work in progress from a global, multidisciplinary community of scholars.
For additional information, including past programs and 2015 program updates, visit the ISHTIP website at www.ishtip.org. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Elena Cooper of the CREATe team (elena.cooper@glasgow.ac.uk).
First Annual ISHTIP Workshop The Construction of Immateriality
Practices of Appropriation and the Genealogy of Intellectual Property Bocconi University, Milan Italy
26-27 June 2009
