External Events 2006 - 2007

On April 19, 2006, Lionel Bently gave a paper at the AHRC funded, New Directions in Copyright Workshop held at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio. Hosted by Martha Woodmansee, the theme of the workshop was copyright and new technologies. Papers were presented by Birgitte Andersen (Birkbeck), Maurizio Borghi (Bocconi), Kathy Bowrey (UNSW/University of Technology, Sydney), Uma Suthersanen (QMW). Lionel’s paper drew on the theme of ‘when old technologies were new’ to explore intellectual property law’s reaction to an old technology, that of telegraphy. Developing work previously published in the (2004) Loyola (Los Angeles) Law Review, the paper explored debates at the turn of the twentieth century in India and (as it was then known) Ceylon. Whereas in Ceylon, the legislature responded to the use of telegraphy to transmit news by enacting an Ordinance preventing re-use of such information, attempts (from the 1880s) to obtain such a law in India failed. The paper explored the positions of protagonists to attempt to explain why two countries, geographically proximate to one another, should adopt such divergent positions. Further details of the conference, including abstracts, are available at AHRC Copyright Research Network


A further conference was held at Case Western from April 20-22, entitled Con/texts of Invention and organised by Martha Woodmansee, Peter Jaszi and Mario Biagioli. Under the aegis of the Society for Critical Exchange, this was an inter-disciplinary exploration of cultural and technological creativity (and its ownership). The conference boasted an international body of contributors, and topics ranged widely from the history of protection of plants, to the tensions between the public domain and traditional knowledge. Lionel Bently chaired a panel of papers concerned with the author construct by Lisa Gitelman, Clifford Siskin and William Warner, Peter Yu and Jane Gaines. Details of the conference and abstracts are available at Con/texts of Invention: A Working Conference

Lionel Bently’s comments highlighted the failure of contemporary critical discourse to de-throne the author construct, and pointed towards the possibility that those opposed to continued expansion of IPRs might be better to embrace authorship as a tool in their campaign than to focus on the construct as the cause of these ills. Professor Bently plans to explore this theme further in the Horace Manges lecture at Columbia University in April 2006.


The ALAI Study Days for 2006 were held in Barcelona on June 19-20 and hosted by the University (under the careful stewardship of Raquel Xabalarder). The theme of the conference was copyright and freedom of expression. Lionel Bently presented a short paper on copyright and parody, in which he compared the approaches of various common law systems (highlighting, incidentally, there notable lack of uniformity). While US fair use jurisprudence represented particularly by Campbell v Acuff Rose suggests that parody is more likely to be regarded as fair dealing than satire, Canadian (Michelin) and Australian (The Panel case) authorities on the fair dealing for criticism and review defence hint at the opposite outcome.


Taking advantage of the presence of many copyright specialists in one location, on June 21 the Wittem Group on European copyright harmonization met to consider the question of moral rights at the Open University of Barcelona.


Lionel Bently chaired a panel on Global convergence and Divergence at the Birkbeck AHRC New Directions in Copyright conference on June 27 & 28. The panel comprised inter alia Professor Graeme Dinwoodie (Chicago Kent and QMW) who discussed international copyright, asking what if anything was different about international norm-setting than norm-creation at national level; Professor Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel (Utrecht School of Arts), who presented their radical plan for a world without copyright (or a much briefer period of exclusivity); Louise Longdin (University of Auckland) who discussed the law and politics of parallel trade; and Dr christophe germann, who discussed issues of cultural diversity in a world of globalised intellectual property rights. Their papers and abstracts are available from AHRC Copyright Research Network


Lionel Bently also gave a paper at the Singapore IP Academy’s Global Forum on Intellectual Property, 21-22 August 2006. Amongst the highlights of the conference were the keynote papers of Professors Reto Hilty (MPI) on problems and challenges facing copyright law, Judge Joachin Bornkamm on the extended scope of trade mark law, Hugh Laddie (UCL) on databases and Bill Cornish on the lessons of history. Further details are available at GFIP 2006 Lionel Bently’s presentation, Whither (or wither) copyright? is available here.

ATRIP 2006 was held in Parma from 4-6 September, organised by the current Chairman, Professor Gustavo Ghidini. The theme of the conference was Intellectual Property and Market Power. Lionel Bently gave a paper entitled From Communication to Thing: Historical Reflections on The Conceptualisation of Trade Marks as Property. His powerpoint slides are available here. The full paper will be published in G. Dinwoodie & M. Janis (eds.), (Edward Elgar, 2007).

A workshop on the took place at the University of Oslo on September 11, 2006, organised by Harald Ingens-Jansen. Papers were given by Erlin Hjelmeng (Oslo), Tom Vapaavuori (Helsinki) and Sören Őman (Deputy Chair of the Swedish Labour Court). Lionel Bently gave a talk on the subject matter of protection in the English law of confidence. The powerpoint slides for this presentation are available here.

Lionel Bently delivered the 20th Annual Horace S. Manges Lecture on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 at  the Kernochan Center for Law, Media & the Arts, Columbia Law School, New York