Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) Podcast

Professor Alice Lee, Associate Professor, Hong Kong University, gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "An Exception for Parody - A Common Concern in the Recent Copyright Consultation in UK and Hong Kong" on Thursday 5 December 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

Alice Lee specializes in property/land law and intellectual property law. Her academic interests also extend to legal bilingualism. She has taught undergraduate and postgraduate students at HKU, students from Tsinghua University and Santa Clara University, as well as Hong Kong civil servants. In recognition of her excellence in teaching, she was awarded the title "University Teaching Fellow" in November 1999.

She is a contributing author of the LexisNexis looseleaf publication Intellectual Property Rights: Hong Kong SAR and PRC (with Michael Pendleton and Jared Margolis).

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Dr Eleonora Rosati (Research Associate, CRASSH and CIPIL), gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "If You Expect Nothing From Anybody, You're Never Disappointed: Orphan Works in the EU and UK" on Thursday 14 November 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

Eleonora is currently a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where she is working on the AHRC-funded project 'The Creative Economy, Digital Technology and Innovation'. The project, which is led by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), intends to explore and address, among other things, the various copyright issues facing digitization of collections of UK museums and libraries. Eleonora holds two top-rate law degrees from the University of Florence (Italy), and an LLM from the University of Cambridge.

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Professor Sam Ricketson, Professor of Law at Melbourne Law School, gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "The Past and Present of the Paris Convention" on Thursday 7 November 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Dr Ge Chen gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "From Shevill to Pinckney: How the European Courts Balance Information Regarding Rights in Internet Jurisdiction" on Thursday 24 October 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

Dr Chen is a Research Associate in intellectual property and global regulation at the University of Cambridge, where he is working on a CIGREF-funded project entitled "Intellectual Property Law and Freedom: between the national and the international". The project is based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and committed to studying the intertwining relationship between freedom and regulation in copyright and privacy law in digital environment from both national and international perspectives. The project aims at exploring the issue under different national jurisdictions and international law and establishing models for understanding the legal issue in order to facilitate future strategies and policies.

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Professor Tim Wu, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Net Neutrality and Freedom of Speech" on Thursday 30th May 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

The Internet has been widely understood, at least in the United States, as a boon to new forms of speech, though some of the quality of the speech generated is criticized. Net Neutrality is a relatively recent regulatory and normative principle that concerns the carriage of content on the Internet. In legal form it is usually mandates non-discrimination among similar content by carriers. Recently, Net Neutrality rules have been challenged as an infringement of the free speech of the telephone companies, most notably, Verizon in the United States. In this talk I'll discuss the challenge, and discuss more broadly the impact of Net Neutrality rules, or the lack thereof, on speech on the Internet.

Tim Wu, currently visiting Cambridge, is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Tim Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, and his general fields are private power, free speech, copyright and antitrust. Outside of academia, he recently served as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, was former Chair of Media reform group Free Press, a fellow at Google, and worked for Riverstone Networks in Silicon Valley. He was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School.

Wu has also been a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago law schools. His 2010 book, The Master Switch was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, Amazon, Scribes, Publisher's Weekly, and other publications. He was recognized as one of Harvard's 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine, and in 2013 he was recognized as one of America's 100 most influential lawyers by the National Law Journal

Wu is a regular contributor to the New Yorker's business and technology vertical, and a contributing editor at the New Republic. He has also twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing.

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Rajeev Sachdev, Ph.D researcher at Maastricht University, gave an evening seminar entitled "Towards an Improved Legal Framework for Trademarks and Copyrights in Social Media and Mobile Apps: Web 2.0 Legal Lessons from the Silicon Valley" on Tuesday 21st May 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

A presentation of research on how key Californian social media giants are dealing with intellectual property disputes and some pertinent legal gaps in both the US and EU.

Rajeev Sachdev is a Californian Lawyer, holds an MBA in Marketing, graduated magna cum laude with an LLM (concentration in E-Commerce) and is currently a PhD researcher at Maastricht University. His research is focused on the intersection of IP law and Cyberlaw. He will be a Visiting Researcher at UC Berkeley School of Law this summer. He has taught over 30 business and legal courses and been a guest speaker on issues of IP and Cyberlaw at a number of institutions.

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Professor Christopher Marsden, University of Sussex, and Mr Ian Brown, Oxford University, gave an evening seminar entitled "Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age" on Thursday 10th May 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

Christopher T. Marsden is Professor of Law at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Net Neutrality: Towards a Co-Regulatory Solution, Internet Co-Regulation, and three other books. Ian Brown is Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute. He is the editor of the Research Handbook on Governance of the Internet.

Internet use has become ubiquitous in the past two decades, but governments, legislators, and their regulatory agencies have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing Internet technologies and uses. In this presentation, based on their recent book of the same title, regulatory lawyer Christopher Marsden and computer scientist Ian Brown analyze the regulatory shaping of ‘code’ – the technological environment of the Internet – to achieve more economically efficient and socially just regulation.

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Justin Turner QC, gave an evening seminar entitled "Do we need patents for Embryonic Stem Cells?" on Thursday 2nd May 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

Do patents matter? Stem cell science is, to a greater or lesser extent, to be denied patent protection. Apparently it is unethical, notwithstanding that it has been funded by national governments and the Commission. The reasons for this (which do not always appear in the judgments) will be considered. Unusually for IP, this talk will encompass political intrigue, the machinations of the Catholic church and, in a manner of speaking, sex.

Justin Turner QC is a barrister who specialises in IP. He represented WARF before the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO in the leading case on stem cell patents and sat on GTAC, a government advisory committee on stem cell research.

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Dr Yahong Li, Associate Professor and Deputy Head at the Department of Law, University of Hong Kong, gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Changes in Chinese patent law and the impact on innovation in China" on Thursday 2nd May 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

China has become a patent powerhouse lately, but has China become more innovative? Have the frequent changes in Chinese patent law affected the trend of patenting and innovation in China? Using China as a case study, this talk attempts to find correlation, if any, between patenting, patent law reform and innovation.

Dr Yahong Li is an Associate Professor and Deputy Head at the Department of Law, University of Hong Kong. She is also an Associate Director at HKU Technology Transfer Office. She specializes in intellectual property law with a focus on cross-disciplinary study on intellectual property and cutting-edge technologies such as biotechnology and information technology, and publishes extensively in relevant area including a book entitled Imitation to Innovation in China: the Role of Patents in Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries (Edward Elgar, 2010).

Dr Li is currently an elected Council Member of the Intellectual Property Law Association of China Law Society; a Regional Coordinator for copyright law amendment project under China State Administration of Copyright, a co-Legal Project Lead of Hong Kong Creative Commons, an Honorary Advisor to Hong Kong Institute of Patent Attorneys, and an Associate External Academic Advisor for City University of Hong Kong School of Law.

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk

Professor Paul Heald, University of Illinois School of Law, gave an seminar entitled "Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter the Public Domain? Empirical Tests of Copyright Term Extension" on Thursday 28th February 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law).

Paul Heald (University of Illinois School of Law) lectures on patent, copyright and international intellectual property law around the world and has previously held visiting positions at universities in London, Lyon, Regensburg and Innsbruck, and at the University of Chicago, University of Texas and Vanderbilt University. He also taught in the UGA/OSU program at St. Anne's College, Oxford University, during the spring of 2009.

Professor Heald is a Herbert Smith Visiting Fellow at the Faculty during the Lent and Easter terms 2013.

According to the current copyright statute, in 2018, copyrighted works of music, film, and literature will begin to transition into the public domain. While this will prove a boon for users and creators, it could be disastrous for the owners of these valuable copyrights. Accordingly, the next few years will witness another round of aggressive lobbying by the film, music, and publishing industries to extend the terms of already-existing works. These industries, and a number of prominent scholars, claim that when works enter the public domain bad things will happen to them. They worry that works in the public domain will be underused, overused, or tarnished in ways that will undermine the works’ cultural and economic value. Although the validity of their assertions turn on empirically testable hypotheses, very little effort has been made to study them.

This research attempts to fill that gap by studying the market for audiobook recordings of bestselling novels. Data from our research, including a novel human subjects experiment, suggest that the claims about the public domain are suspect. Our data indicate that audio books made from public domain bestsellers (1913-22) are significantly more available than those made from copyrighted bestsellers (1923-32). In addition, our experimental protocol suggests that professionally made recordings of public domain and copyrighted books are of similar quality. Finally, while a low quality recording seems to lower a listener's valuation of the underlying work, our data do not suggest any correlation between that valuation and legal status of the underlying work. Accordingly, ourresearch indicates that the significant costs of additional copyright protection for already-existing works are not justified by the benefits claimed for it. These findings will be crucially important to the inevitable congressional and judicial debate over copyright term extension in the next few years.

Recent publications have focused on economic aspects of IP law, including theoretical papers on optimal patent remedies, the role transaction costs in patent law and the problem of patent pricing as well as empirical studies on best-selling fiction and musical compositions from 1913 to 1932 and the behavior of famous trademarks in product and service markets. He has also written two books on law and literature, and his first novel, No Regrets, was published by St. James Music Press in 2002.

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk