Events, News

Panel Discussion on Intellectual Property Law Scholarship and Pedagogy 
in Times of Covid-19 Pandemic

Co-hosted by 
Center for Social Critiques of Law, Kent Law School and 

International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP)

Panelists: 
Graham Dutfield (Leeds)
Hyo Yoon Kang (Kent)
Fiona Macmillan (Birkbeck)
Luke McDonagh (LSE)
Aisling McMahon (Maynooth)
Alain Pottage (Kent/ SciencesPo)
Els Torreele (UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose) 

Traditionally IP law, and patent law in particular, had been regarded a legal technical and technocratic subfield. This panel discussion intends to review and discuss the state of the IP scholarship and pedagogy in light of the fissures within the field that have been laid bare at least since the so-called “TRIPS IP waiver” discussion. 

Over the course of the pandemic, issues around intellectual property law, especially regarding monopoly rights and trade secrets around the Covid-19 vaccine, have been problematised in general media. These have often centered around the ongoing battle for TRIPS IP waiver since October 2020. 

Amidst the ongoing discussions, intellectual property law and particularly patent law, have been catapulted into the public eye. After US threw in its limited support, there has been a divergence of perspectives on the Waiver proposal argued by IP scholars, both in favour and against the proposal and its significance. 

Diverse approaches to IP law and its purpose within the scholarship are not new. The current crystallisation of IP law’s current role in the prolonging of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, affords an apt opportunity to take review the scholarly field of of intellectual property law itself and its political and social role. 

The panel will discuss existing IP law scholarship and pedagogy, identifying their epistemological and ontological foundations, methodologies, and their relation to the current political economy. It will critically assess the past and present of the IP scholarly field and offer some thoughts for its improvement. 

Free registration: https://kent-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqdeCqpzoqHdKMtjgmGkh8LL04sBAPFQO7

Events

‘Cultural Heritage and IP’, Fiona Macmillan in conversation with Jose Bellido and Kathy Bowrey

May 20 BST 11am/CET 12 noon/ Pacific 3am/EST 6am/AEST 8pm

‘Cultural Heritage and IP’, Fiona Macmillan (Birkbeck) in conversation with Jose Bellido (Kent) and Kathy Bowrey (UNSW)

The encounter between creativity and cultural production, on the one hand, and legal regulation, on the other, demonstrates the systemic and conceptual limits of the law. It raises a host of questions that traverse – in multiple senses and contexts – distinctions between things like public and private, property and the commons, individual and community, product and process, idea and expression, tangible and intangible, movable and immovable, conservation and destruction, authentic and fake, and, perhaps most fundamentally, nature and culture. This book is about these binary distinctions – about how they hold and how they do not hold – in the context of the legal regimes governing copyright and cultural heritage. While the book argues that these two legal regimes are held together by a common approach to these binary distinctions, they are also held apart by their dominant frames of reference. While copyright as a private property right locates all relationships in the context of the market, the context of cultural heritage relationships is the community, of which the market forms a part but does not – or, at least, should not – control the whole. The current international law concept of cultural heritage, however, is weakened and hollowed out by a fossilized vision of heritage that is not up to the task of resisting the constant impositions of the market. The book proposes a radicalized concept of cultural heritage/property that locates and regulates cultural production within the dynamic and mutually constitutive process of community formation. Only such a concept, the book argues, will provide a basis for resisting the reduction of everything to its value in the market, for resisting the commodification, and creeping propertization, of all our cultural production.

Fiona Macmillan is Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Roma Tre and the University of Technology, Sydney. She is a member of the ISHTIP Executive Committee. Her new book, Intellectual and Cultural Property. Between Market and Community, was published by Routledge, 2021.

Jose Bellido is Reader in Law at Kent University. He is a member of the ISHTIP Governing Board and a PASSIM project team member.

Kathy Bowrey is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales and Co-Director, ISHTIP. She is a Visiting Scholar, State Library of NSW (2021) and Research Fellow, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Australia.

To download a transcript of this discussion:

Coming soon

Events

‘Patent Capital in the Covid-19 Pandemic’, Hyo Yoon Kang in conversation with Mario Biagioli and Javier Lezaun

May 4 BST 10am/CET 11am/Pacific 2am/EST 5am/ AEST 7pm

‘Patent Capital in the Covid-19 Pandemic’, Hyo Yoon Kang (Kent) in conversation with Mario Biagioli (UCLA) and Javier Lezaun (Oxford)

In the present pandemic, there has been increased public interest and media reporting on intellectual property, in particular patents and know-how, in relation to the vaccine and other medicines against Covid-19. The WTO is still considering the proposed waiver of TRIPS related enforcement of intellectual property rights in Covid-19 medicines. Such an interest in the purpose and effects of patent rights has also been accompanied by some misunderstandings and misleading polemics.

Drawing on her recent writing about ‘Patent Capital in the Covid-19 Pandemic’ as a starting point, Hyo Yoon Kang will be in conversation with Mario Biagioli and Javier Lezaun. In light of the current extraordinary mobilisation of scientific, technical and financial resources, the panel will discuss the justification for patents and the notions of commons and publics, and consider them within the interdisciplinary intellectual property, science and technology studies scholarships.

Hyo Yoon Kang is Reader in Law at University of Kent. She leads Kent Law School as a project partner in the ERC PASSIM project.

Mario Biagioli is Distinguished Professor of Law and Communication at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is a member of the ISHTIP Advisory Board.

Javier Lezaun is Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) at the University of Oxford.

To download a transcript of this discussion:

Patent Capital, ZOOM 4 May 2021Download
Events

‘Commodification of creativity’, Kathy Bowrey in conversation with Martin Fredriksson and Brad Sherman

22 April BST 11am/CET 12 noon/ Pacific 3am/EST 6am/AEST 8pm

‘Commodification of creativity’, Kathy Bowrey (UNSW) in conversation with Martin Fredriksson (Linköping) and Brad Sherman (Uni of Queensland)

There is an enduring and wide-reaching interest in understanding how copyright interacts with creativity, free speech, national cultures and new technologies. Without tracing the incorporation of authorship into the actual business practices of the global book, music and film industries we can’t begin to fully appreciate creator investments in copyright philosophy. How was the author’s right to intangible property as established in the 19th century so effectively mobilised by multinational corporations to create the modern cultural industries of the 20th century? Despite the image projected in advocacy that highlighted the benefits of copyright to all in the abstract, not all writers exploited copyright in the same manner or had access to the same social privileges, though standard forms of exploitation did emerge. To understand why some benefited and why others did less well, the relevance of writers’ different personalities, personal objectives, knowledge, experience, social networks and fortunes needs to be taken into account, but these factors play out differently depending upon genre, anticipated market, commodity forms and geographical location. Change in the significance of copyright and better outcomes for creators can come about when the value of authorship is reconsidered in light of a deeper understanding of how law functions in the cultural marketplace. It is hoped that readers of this book will support this endeavour by drawing upon a more critical understanding of copyright’s history in the 20th century and, in helping shift how relationships between art, law and society are perceived, deliver more control over creative lives than was evident in the previous century.

Kathy Bowrey is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, University of New South Wales and Co-Director, ISHTIP. Her new book Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value. Incorporating the Author was published by Routledge, 2021.

Martin Fredriksson is Associate Professor at the Unit for Culture and Society (Tema Q), Linköping University. He is a member of the ISHTIP Governing Board.

Brad Sherman is Professor of Law and UQ Laureate Fellow at the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland. He is a member of the ISHTIP Advisory Board.

To download a transcript of this discussion:

Commodification of Creativity, ZOOM event 22 April 2021Download

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Events, News

Passim Workshop 2020

PATENTS AS CAPITAL

Call for Papers

We invite contributions to the workshop “Patents as Capital,” which forms the 2nd workshop of the ERC- funded project PASSIM (Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020), in collaboration with The International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP).

Dates: 8-10 September 2020
Venue: Nobel Museum, Stockholm, SWEDEN
Call closes: 14 February 2020
Proposal format: 500 Word proposal/200 Word bio
Submit to: 2020workshop@passim.se

Patents are regarded as central techniques and indicators of value in the ‘knowledge economy’ by linking immaterial knowledge to capital. In intellectual property scholarship, particularly that approaches law as economics or as a regulatory tool, patents are commonly studied as means of commercial and economic strategies. But this focus leaves out the other ways in which patents act as both instruments and representations of diverse kinds of capital: intellectual, cultural, scientific and financial capital(s). The concrete processes by which patents are implicated in and give rise to various practices of capitalisation and valuation remain relatively underexplored. Rather than equating patent with value, or presuming that patents generate intellectual capital, this workshop aims to examine and delineate the workings of patents as capital in their multiple manifestations: as personal privilege, scientific credit, cultural symbol, instrument of credibility and as financial proxies. These are only examples of the queries that we would like to discuss.We welcome cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary contributions that problematise and analyse the promises and failings of patents as capital and that study the role of patents in such capitalisation processes.

We will give preference to unpublished papers that seek substantive feedback from participants of the workshop. PASSIM will cover the travel and accommodation cost of the selected participants.

Any questions can be directed to the organizers of the workshop:

Björn Hammarfelt (bjorn.hammarfelt@hb.se)
Gustav Källstrand (gustav.kallstrand@nobelcenter.se)
Hyo Yoon Kang (h.y.kang@kent.ac.uk)

PASSIM is a five-year (2017-2022) project funded by an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant (741095) to Professor Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, Linköping University, Sweden, PASSIM focuses on the “openness” aspect of patents, considering their role as technoscientific documents in the history of information and intellectual property. For more information on the project and the team, send us an e-mail: contact@passim.se, follow us on twitter @passimproject or visit our website www.passim.se.

Details of last year’s PASSIM workshop can be found here.

News

Twelfth Annual ISHTIP Workshop

Please note: The 12th ISHTIP Annual Workshop will be held at Bournemouth University, UK, 12-16 July 2021.

This will be an online event.

More details and final program to come shortly.

The 13th workshop is now scheduled to be held at Gothenberg University in 2022.

12th Annual ISHTIP Workshop

Landmarks of Intellectual Property

Bournemouth University, UK 12-16 July 2021

Landmark noun, often attributive

land·mark | \ land-märk \

  1. An object (such as a stone or tree) that marks the boundary of land
  2. A conspicuous object on land that marks a locality (originally and esp. as a guide to sailors in navigation)
  3. An event or development that marks a turning point or a stage
  4. A structure (such as a building) of unusual historical and usually aesthetic interest especially: one that is officially designated and set aside for preservation

After hosting its annual workshop in 2019 in the location that is home to the largest natural harbour in the world, Sydney, the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property will host its 12th annual workshop in the second largest natural harbour in the world: Poole, UK—home to Bournemouth University. This year’s theme, Landmarks of Intellectual Property, is inspired by its county Dorset, which is known for the Jurassic Coast, World Heritage Site on the English Channel southern coast of England, which stretches across 95 miles, and which features the natural limestone landmark Durdle Door.

The Landmarks workshop will explore the contemporary relevance of the landmarks of intellectual property. Proposals are invited to consider the different ways in which a place, a time, a personality, a case, or a particular year has become a landmark of IP. These might include challenging or questioning (the idea of) certain landmarks of IP; proposing new ones; or highlighting unsung ones, be they milestones, vantage points, beacons, breakthroughs, events, turning points, or anniversaries. Contributions may also critique dominant frameworks or theories, thus putting into perspective the significance of such turning points by highlighting the role of historical contingencies, discontinuities and cultural difference.

The final panel will be dedicated to the work of Prof Martha Woodmansee who founded ISHTIP in 2008, and who has recently retired.

The workshop is hosted by CIPPM / Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence for European Intellectual Property and Information Rights, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission. Organising Committee: Maurizio Borghi, Claudy Op den Kamp, and Ruth Towse

Events, News

PASSIM Workshop

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY FOR THE UN-DISCIPLINE(D):

The first workshop from the ERC-funded project PASSIM (Patents as Scientific Information, 1895- 2020), in collaboration with The International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP).

 Dates: September 10-13, 2019 
Venue: Norrköping, SWEDEN   
Call closes: January 31, 2019 Acceptance by: February 15, 2019 
Proposal format: 500 Word proposal/200 Word bio 
 Submit to: eva.hemmungs.wirten@liu.se

Research on copyright, patents and trademarks engage scholars across a wide spectrum of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. No longer reserved for law and legal scholarship, a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches now inform and drive interdisciplinary intellectual property scholarship.

Together with ISHTIP (the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property www.ishtip.org), the ERC-funded project “Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020” (PASSIM) now invite proposals to its first workshop, “Intellectual Property for the Un-Discipline(d).” The goal of the workshop is to foster an innovative dialogue on the limits and possibilities of interdisciplinary intellectual property scholarship. In the “high-risk, high-gain” spirit of the ERC grants, we invite papers that creatively engage with intellectual property as research experience, that explore the dynamics of new and unexpected topics and perspectives, and that open up to self-reflexivity in respect to choices of material, methods, narration and (inter)disciplinary infidelities. We especially encourage submissions focused on the “doing of” intellectual property scholarship as boundary work, exploring the assumptions and challenges involved in your own research. Successful candidates (4-5 scholars) will have travel and lodging paid for by PASSIM and can expect to present their research in a stimulating and generous milieu, consisting not only of the PASSIM team but of specially invited, experienced researchers in the field: Fiona Macmillan (co-Director of ISHTIP, Birkbeck Law and Roma Tre); Gabriel Galvez-Behar (Economic History, Université de Lille); Evan Hepler-Smith (History of Science, Boston College) and Shobita Parthasarathy (Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, University of Michigan). For more information about the call and funding scheme, please e-mail eva.hemmungs.wirten@liu.se.

PASSIM is a five-year (2017-2022) project funded by an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant (741095) to Professor Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, Linköping University, Sweden, PASSIM focuses on the “openness” aspect of patents, considering their role as technoscientific documents in the history of information and intellectual property. For more information on the project and the team, please visit www.passim.se.

Call for papers, News

Workshop 2019 Call for Papers

Workshop 2019 Call for Papers

University of Technology Sydney, 4 – 6 July 2019

Registration and local details are available here.

UPDATE:

  • Date for submission of proposals: *Deadline extended* 23 November 2018
  • Expected date for notification of acceptance:  21 December 2018
  • Date for submission of full papers: 1 June 2019

Intellectual Property and the Visual

“We entered and cast anchor, and in the morning went oh-ing and ah-ing in admiration up through the crooks and turns of the spacious and beautiful harbor – a  harbor which is the darling of Sydney and the wonder of the world.”

Mark Twain, Following the Equator

The International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property will hold its 11th annual workshop at the University of Technology Sydney on 4 – 6 July 2019. The city of Sydney is renowned for its spectacular natural setting and architectural landmarks. This year’s theme, Intellectual Property and the Visual, draws inspiration from its striking host city. The ‘visual turn’ in law has received growing attention in recent years from scholars exploring effects of the proliferation of images in social and legal spaces on the legal imagination. The 2019 workshop will explore aspects of the visual turn in the context of intellectual property law. Proposals for papers are invited to consider different ways in which the visual and the legal interact in relation to different fields of intellectual property law. These might include considering how intellectual property law treats visual subject matters, how subjects of intellectual property law or the law itself are represented or perceived, relationships between legal texts and images, the use of visual metaphors and images in the development of intellectual property law and interdisciplinary interactions with fields such as art history, visual studies, aesthetics, socio-legal and cultural studies.

Papers that address this call from an historical or theoretical perspective are welcomed from scholars working across the disciplines. Established and junior scholars are encouraged to submit papers and there will be a session devoted to presentations from doctoral students.  Proposers should be aware that authors (except for PhD students) do not present their own papers at ISHTIP workshops. Rather, a discussant presents a brief summary and critique of papers to facilitate a more general discussion. To allow this, complete papers must be submitted by 1 June 2019.

Proposals for papers should be no more than one page and accompanied by a 2 page CV. Submissions should be sent by email to Isabella.Alexander@uts.edu.au.

Date for submission of proposals: 23 November 2018

Expected date for notification of acceptance:  21 December 2018

Date for submission of full papers: 1 June 2019

 

News

2018 Pre-event Roundtable – Call for Papers

Call for Participation

Histories of Intellectual Property in Numerous Objects—Interdisciplinary Insights

University of Roma Tre, 3 July 2018

(Preceding main ISHTIP Workshop, 4-6 July)

We are pleased to announce a roundtable preceding the ISHTIP Workshop, based around the underlying idea of A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects (Cambridge University Press, 2018, forthcoming).

The book shows how objects and material culture can provide an approachable way to tell histories of intellectual property, focusing on 50 objects—including the Singer Sewing Machine, the Corset, the Football, the Barbie Doll, and the Post-it. The book presents intellectual property as an interdisciplinary topic, reflected in the remarkable diversity of backgrounds of the editors and authors, and the approaches used to tell the histories of these objects. With short textual entries and numerous images, the book is intended to be accessible to a wide range of readers—encompassing scholars and students in humanities, law, and social science, as well as legal practitioners, inventors, authors, and the interested reader of cultural histories.

Our roundtable will unpack some of these “IP objects,” and from them develop ideas of how we can best undertake interdisciplinary work on intellectual property. We have invited a range of contributors to present their objects and their entries in lightning talks. The roundtable will also provide the opportunity for a wider discourse on the benefits, challenges and risks of interdisciplinarity in intellectual property research.

We expect a deep and wide-ranging discussion. We invite you to join us, and welcome proposals of objects you’d like to discuss (and bring!) or particular themes/disciplines you’d like to examine. Early career researchers are specifically encouraged to express their interest. We think that the roundtable is going to be fun, and very fruitful.

 

Claudy Op den Kamp copdenkamp@bournemouth.ac.uk

Dan Hunter dhunter@swin.edu.au

 

 

Histories of Intellectual Property in Numerous Objects—Interdisciplinary Insights

University of Roma Tre

Via Ostiense, 161

00154 Rome

Italy

3 July 2018, at 3pm

Call for papers, News, Papers, Workshops

Workshop 2018 Call for Papers

Annual ISHTIP Workshop

University of Roma Tre, 4-6 July 2018

 Call for Papers

Intellectual Property and Heritage

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

Written papers due: 1 June 2018

International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP)