Benjamin White is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Intellectual Property, Policy & Management (CIPPM) and a postdoctoral student at Waseda University, Tokyo Japan from September 2026 – August 2027,  funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Benjamin’s research involved the study of intellectual property law in regards to the future of AI within the European Digital Single Market and he successfully defended his PhD thesis in March 2026 and was awarded his doctorate in May 2026.

He was PhD student under the supervision of Professor Dinusha Mendis and  Professor Maurizio Borghi.

Prior to joining Bournemouth University he was Head of Intellectual Property at the British Library. He also participated in a 2 year European Commission funded project called Future TDM, looking at the barriers to further uptake in Europe of data analytics and AI technologies. To his knowledge he was the first person in Europe to call for a copyright exception for text and data mining in 2008.

He also chaired the Legal Working Group of Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherché (LIBER) and sits on the UK Intellectual Property Office’s Unregistered Intellectual Properties Research Expert Advisory Group, as well as Libraries Archives Copyright Alliance and the International Federation of Libraries Association’s Copyright & Other Legal Matters Group.