The two day event included eminent keynote speakers in Intellectual Property Law (IPL) and Cultural Heritage (CH).
New Intellectual Property Lawyers & Scule Conference
From the shape of guitars, fashion brands, parody, dance, disability and re-mixing to museum collections, digitisation, data-mining and folklore, this interdisciplinary conference addressed the many varied and complex relationship between Intellectual Property (IP), cultural heritage (CH) and intangible cultural heritage (ICH).
Why IP Matters: Who Owns the Arts and Sciences was an inter-disciplinary Conference held at the University of Exeter, UK, (22-23 June 2015). The inaugural event was organised by doctoral students at Exeter to launch a new initiative, the New IP Lawyers Network, and was funded by the Science, Culture and Law Research Centre (Scule) at Exeter.
The main questions that the conference aimed to address included:
- Does owning creative and innovative works matter?
- Can the law really shape the Arts and Sciences to the extent of encouraging innovation?
- Should individuals own pieces of our culture or of human progress?
The two day event included eminent keynote speakers in Intellectual Property Law (IPL) and CH: Dr Eleonora Rosati (University of Southampton) ‘EU Copyright: Just like a New IP Lawyer’; Professor Graeme Dinwoodie (University of Oxford) ‘The Territorial Character of Trade Mark Law in a Post National Era’ and Professor Charlotte Waelde (University of Exeter) ‘On Cultural heritage and intellectual property Laws’. Professor Lionel Bently (University of Cambridge) delivered the annual Scule lecture, ‘Innovation – The New Paradigm in IP law?’ which reflected on the current changes in nomenclature and questioned the shift from ‘intellectual property’ to ‘innovation’.
Conference papers were presented by a diverse range of practising lawyers, academics and post-graduate students from different countries and backgrounds including human rights, cultural historians and CH professionals reflecting the inter-disciplinary nature of the conference.
Date: 8 July 2015