External events 2007 - 2008

Professor Lionel Bently gave the The Annual Horace S. Manges Lecture at Columbia University in April 2007 on 'The People vs. The Author: From the Death Sentence to Community Service' and later in the year spoke at conferences and workshops at UCLA, Fordham, NYU, Montpellier, and Bergen, as well as at LSE and QMIPRI.

In August 2007 Professor Bently visited the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore where he held the post of Yong Shook Lin Professor in IP Law and taught an intensive course, Topics in IP Law. At the end of September, he spoke at a conference at Kanazawa University in Japan, on harmonization of copyright in Europe. In the Michaelmas term, he spoke at a conference in Bergen, organized by Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, on ‘Copyright as the Engine of Free Expression.’ The slides from Professor Bently’s talk, which related to historical conceptions of the functions of copyright law, are here. He also gave a lecture to the AIPPI (International Association for Protection of Industrial Property) on ‘Copyright as an Industrial Property Right.’ The slides are here.

During the Lent Term 2008 Professor Bently was the BNL Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia University, New York. With Professor Jane Ginsburg he taught a course in "Comparative Trademark and Unfair Competition Law". While he was in New York Professor Bently presented a paper at a conference held at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law  on the 19th February on ‘Convergences and Divergences in Transatlantic Trademark Law’, with other speakers including Dev Gangjee and Rob Brauneis. The slides for the paper, entitled, ‘Features of Trade Mark Acquisition in Europe’, are here. He also sat on a number of panels at the Annual Fordham International Intellectual Property Law and Policy Conference (27th-28th March) and chaired a session on Fair Use at the Cardozo Law School International Harmonization of Copyright Limitations and Exceptions Conference on 31st March. Professor Bently also participated in the Trademark Scholars’ Roundtable at the University of Iowa College of Law  on 11th -12th April, hosted by Professors Mark Janis and Graeme Dinwoodie.

In July 2008 Professor Bently spoke at an evening meeting of the Competition Law Association, held at Bird and Bird's offices in London.  The meeting was entitled "Extension of sound recording and performers rights: an issue of fairness" and was chaired by Lord Justice Mummery.  The other speaker was Richard Mollett, Director of Public Affairs at the BPI, where he is responsible for leading the record companies' engagement with government, political audiences and industry stakeholders on the major issues facing the record industry.  Slides from Professor Bently's talk are available here and a report of the event by Justin Watts, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, here.

Professor Bently also presented a talk on 'Propertization of Information in the British Colonies, 1814-1914' at a roundtable at the Second European Congress on World History (Dresden, July 5th, 2008). The session was chaired by Professor Hannes Siegrist, and other papers were given by Isabella von Lohr (on the role of international organizations in treaty-making in the field of copyright), Dr Margrit Seckelmann (on internationalization of patent law, from the formation of the Paris Convention to TRIPs) and Sabil Francis (on issues raised from transfer agreements relating to biological material).

AHRC Primary Sources on Copyright History Project: Conference – Wednesday 19th and Thursday 20th March 2008 – Stationers' Hall, London

This two day conference was the culmination of a research project involving the creation of a digital resource concerning the history of copyright in five key jurisdictions; France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US, for the period before 1900. 

The conference venue was the Stationers’ Hall, livery hall of the ancient guild of printers, a company which has a long association with the history of copyright. The conference welcome was given by Professor Bill Cornish and over ninety delegates from all over the world enjoyed hearing keynote speakers Professor Mark Rose (University of California Santa Barbara), Professor Laurent Pfister (University of Versailles Saint-Quentin) and Professor Karl Nikolaus Peifer (Köln University) as well as talks given by the project’s national editors and invited papers from Professor John Feather, Dr Katie Scott, Dr Alastair Mann, William St Clair, Professor Kathy Bowrey, Robin Myers, Dr Maurizio Borghi, Dr Isabella Alexander and Stef von Gompel.

Professor Lionel Bently was joint General Editor of the Project along with Professor Martin Kretschmer of Bournemouth University. Each jurisdiction had its own national editor responsible for the selection of the documents in the database: Britain: Dr Ronan Deazley, (University of Birmingham); German speaking countries: Dr Friedemann Kawohl, (Bournemouth University); Italy Dr Joanna Kostylo, (University of Cambridge); France: Dr Frédéric Rideau, (Université de Poitiers); United States: Dr Oren Bracha, (University of Texas).

The project involved the selection of certain key documents, their digitisation, transcription, and translation. The end result has been to create a free electronic archive of primary sources from the invention of the printing press (ca1450) to the Berne Convention (1886): in facsimile and transcription, translated and key word searchable. The documents include statutes, materials relating to legislative history, case law, tracts, and commentaries. Editorial headnotes provide context. The project has been entirely publicly-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and benefits from an advisory board of internationally-recognised experts in relevant fields. This digital resource will be hugely valuable to scholars from all disciplines interested in the history of copyright and can be found at Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900).   The conference closed with the launch of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) which will support scholarly investigation not only of the national histories of patent, copyright, and "related" rights; but equally of the diverse "roads not taken" in the evolution of these legal structures; of contemporary countertrends; and of the laws and norms that have been devised in non European cultures around the world to manage intellectual production and exchange.

Mark Rose giving his keynote speech, The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright:Areopagitica, the Stationers’ Company, and the Statute of Anne

Friedemann Kawohl, Ronan Deazley, Lionel Bently, Joanna Kostylo, Martin Kretschmer, Frédéric Rideau, Oren Bracha

Lionel Bently and Martin Kretschmer