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

News

10TH ANNUAL WORKSHOP (2018), University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy

University of Roma Tre, 4-6 July 2018

The annual workshop of ISHTIP in 2018 will be held at the School of Law, University of Roma Tre, Via Ostiense 161, 00154 Rome (4-6 July).  It will be jointly organised by the Department of Law – University of Roma Tre, ASK – Bocconi University, and the Department of Cultural Heritage Studies, University of Salerno.

The organisers will be Fiona Macmillan (Birkbeck, University of London), Lillà Montagnani (Bocconi University, Milan) and Giovanni Riccio (University of Salerno).

View the event programme: here

Call for Papers: here

Pre-event Rountable (3rd July) Call for Papers: here

Register for the Workshop

Use these links to sign up for the workshop and related events:

Local Hotel info

The following hotels are in walking distance from the University of Roma Tre:

Keep in Touch

Feel free to subscribe to our mailing list using the form below.

Call for papers, News, Papers, Workshops

Workshop 2017 Call for Papers

ISHTIP

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.

Download the Call for Papers: ISHTIP2017

Register for the Workshop: http://ishtip2017.eventbrite.ca

Book your Hotel: ISHTIP2017 at the Intercontinental

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).

News, Workshops

8th Annual Workshop CREATe, University of Glasgow, UK July 6-8, 2016 “Intellectual Property and Resistance”

ISHTIP

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’

 

Programme: Click Here

 

 

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

 

Programme: Click Here

 

News

Workshop 2016 Programme

[Click Here to return to main page]

 

ISHTIP

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’

 

 

Pre-event: Seminar by Prof. Barton Beebe, New York University School of Law

Bleistein, American Copyright Law, and the Problem of Aesthetic Progress

WED 6th JULY, 10am, CREATe hub (University of Glasgow, 10 The Square, G12 8QQ)

 

PROGRAMME

WED 6th JULY:

12pm-1pm: Lunch and Registration (University of Glasgow, Main Building, Senate Room)1pm-1.10pm: Welcome: Elena Cooper/Martin Kretschmer, CREATe, University of Glasgow, UK

1.10pm-2.25pm: Early Career Panel 1: IP and Resistance through Technology, Culture and Society

Chair: Elena Cooper

Hung The Nguyen, Edinburgh University, UK, ‘The Innocuous Infrastructure: Digital Copyright Hub and the Politics of Infrastructural Delegation’ Alissa Centivany, University of Toronto, Canada, ‘Innovative Deviance and Transformation in Copyright’

Chun-Chi Hung, Queen Mary, London University, UK, ‘Can Indigenous People’s Traditional Cultural Expressions be a Means of Resistance against the Power of Global Intellectual Property Law?’

2.25pm-3.40pm: Early Career Panel 2: IP, Public Access and Control

Chair: Nari Lee, Hanken, Finland

Andrea Wallace, Glasgow University and National Library of Scotland, UK, ‘Cultural Institutions and Surrogate Intellectual Property Rights: Resisting an Artwork’s Transfer into the Public Domain’

Claudy Op den Kamp, Swinburne Law School, Australia, ‘Film Archives as ‘Sites of Resistance’: Exploiting the Public Domain

Natacha Estèves, Sciences Po Law School, Paris, France, ‘‘All are Patent are Belong to You?” ‘Open Patents’ as a Form of Resistance

3.40-3.50pm: Coffee

3.50pm to 5.20pm: ISHTIP Board meeting (attendance optional); chair: Martha Woodmansee, Case Western Reserve University, USA and Fiona Macmillan, Birkbeck, London University, UK

5.30pm to 7.00pm: Opportunity to attend CREATe Performance by Kobe Matthys, agence Brussels (John McIntyre Bldg, University Ave, G12 8QQ):
Assembly of Case Caird v Sime, House of Lords, 13 June 1887 (concerning the unauthorised publication of lectures by Edward Caird, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow)

7.30pm: Buffet reception at 3 Park Terrace, G3 6BY (walking distance through Kelvingrove Park)

 

 

THURS 7th JULY:

9.30am-10.50am: IP and the Politics of Resistance

Chair: Gregory Hagen, University of Calgary, Canada

Betsy Rosenblatt, Whittier Law School, USA, ‘Fair Use as Resistance’ –  Commentator: Danilo Mandic, University of Westminster, UK

Kara Swanson, Northeastern University School of Law, USA, ‘Counting Patents as Path to Full Citizenship: The Case of American Suffragists’ – Commentator: Kathy Bowrey, University of New South Wales, Australia

10.50-12.10pm: Users and Resistance

Chair: Peter Decherney, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Joe Karaganis, The American Assembly, Columbia University, USA, ‘Shadow Libraries’ – Commentator: Maria Lilla’ Montagnani, Bocconi University, Italy

Balazs Bodo, IVIR, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, ‘Custodians.online – An Ethnographic Inquiry into the Guerilla Open Access Movement’ – Commentator: Martin Kretschmer, CREATe, University of Glasgow, UK

12.10pm-1.15pm: Lunch

1.15pm-3.15pm: IP and Local Difference

Chair: Peter Jaszi, American University, Washington College of Law, USA

Augusta Dimou, University of Leipzig, Germany, ‘Global Expansion of Intellectual Property Rights and ‘Reflex Reactions’ from the World’s Peripheries: A Contribution to the History of IP in the Interwar Period’ – Commentator: Gabriel Galvez-Behar, Université Lille, France

Neil Netanel, UCLA School of Law, USA,  ‘Jewish Copyright Law as Imperfect Resistance’ – Commentator: Diana V. Ivanova, Belarusian State University, Belarus

Stef van Gompel, IVIR, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, ‘Legal pragmatism in nineteenth-century intellectual property lawmaking: A case study of the 1869 patent abolition in the Netherlands’ – Commentator: Kara Swanson, Northeastern University School of Law, USA

3.15pm-4.30pm: Discussion panel: Critique and Interdisciplinarity as Resistance 

Martha Woodmansee, Case Western Reserve University, USA (chair), Kathy Bowrey, University of New South Wales, Australia, Peter Decherney, University of Pennsylvania, USA, Fiona Macmillan, Birkbeck, London University, UK.

6pm: Drinks reception/tours of Trades Hall, Glasgow (84 Glassford Street, G1 1UH)

7pm: Conference dinner at Trades Hall, Glasgow

 

 

FRI 8th JULY:

9am-11am: Copyright and Cultural Resistance

Chair: Stina Teilmann-Lock, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Marc Perlman, Brown University, USA, ‘Two Ways to Defend the Public Domain’ – Commentator:  Chen Wei Zhu, University of Birmingham, UK

Kevin Emerson Collins, Washington University School of Law, USA ‘Copyright and Architectural Practice in the United States’ – Commentator: Elena Cooper, CREATe, Glasgow University, UK

Marta Iljadica, Southampton University, UK, ‘Publicly Displayed Works and the Right to the City’ – Commentator: Merima Bruncevic, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

11am-11.10am: Coffee

11.10pm-12.30pm: Trade Marks and Cultural Diversity

Chair: Marianne Dahlén, Uppsala University, Sweden

Michael Birnhack, Tel Aviv University, Israel, ‘National Trademark’ – Commentator: Lionel Bently, Cambridge University, UK

Lucero Ibarra Rojas, Centre for Teaching and Research in Economics (CIDE), Mexico, ‘Beyond Trademarks: What Law Says and What Law Means’ – Commentator: Luke McDonagh, City University, UK

12.30-1.30pm: Lunch

1.30pm – 3.30pm: Resisting IP’s Core Assumptions

Chair: Maurizio Borghi, Bournemouth University, UK

Barton Beebe and Jeanne Fromer, New York University School of Law, USA, ‘Are We Running Out of Trademarks? Evidence from the U.S. PTO Principal Register’ – Commentator: Jose Bellido, University of Kent, UK

Alexander Peukert, Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, ‘Resisting the Ontology of IP: IP Rights as the Regulation of Actions’  – Commentator:  Jonathan Griffiths, Queen Mary, UK

Dan Burk, University of California, Irvine, USA, ‘Copyright and the Cybernetic Circuit’ – Commentator: Christopher Buccafusco, Cardozo Law School, USA

3.30pm-4pm: Primary Sources on Copyright: Introducing the Jewish Law section:  Neil Netanel, UCLA School of Law, USA

 

 

Questions

If you have any further questions, please write to Dr Elena Cooper at: ishtip@create.ac.uk.

 

Call for papers, Workshops

Workshop 2016 Call for Papers

ISHTIP

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).

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