Our public lectures series on topical issues of intellectual property law and policy is open to anyone to attend, but registration is required.
If you wish to attend, please e-mail Prof. Dinusha Mendis at dmendis@bournemouth.ac.uk
Spring Public Lectures Series 2025
Our public lectures series on topical issues of intellectual property law and policy is open to anyone to attend, but registration is required.
Attendance is free, but, registration is required. If you wish to attend, please e-mail Prof. Dinusha Mendis at dmendis@bournemouth.ac.uk
Roger Brownsword (Bournemouth University/Kings College London): Intellectual Property Law, Bioethics, and Technology
Thursday 6 February 2025, 18.00 (BST), Room EB206
How should we understand the relationship between IP law, bioethics, and technology? A plausible starting point is that technological developments have disrupted law (including IP law) as well as posing new questions for bioethics.
In this lecture, we will go back to the disruption of the early 1990s when developments in genetic engineering were disrupting patent law and provoking bioethical interest in the much-contested idea of human dignity. This set up a three-sided debate between those who argued that IP law should operate to support the beneficial development of the new technologies, those who insisted that the priority was for the law to lay down clear red lines that should not be crossed by technologies (no matter how ‘beneficial’ they might seem to be), and IP lawyers who valued the coherence and workability of the law.
More than thirty years later, there continue to be tensions as new technologies, particularly AI, pose novel questions and challenges for both IP law and ethics as well as for regulators who are expected to strike the right balance between supporting beneficial innovation and managing unacceptable risks, and moreover to make their regulatory interventions at the right time and in the right way.
Professor Roger Brownsword, who is a graduate of the LSE, has been an academic lawyer for some 50 years, first at the University of Sheffield and then at King’s College London (where he was founding Director of TELOS in 2007). He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow in 2003-2004, a member of the Law panel for the UK RAE2008 and then for the Hong Kong RAE2014.
He has published about 20 books, most recently Law, Technology and Society―Re-imagining the Regulatory Environment, and more than 250 chapters in books and articles. He is the founding general editor of Law, Innovation and Technology as well as being on the editorial board of the Modern Law Review, the International Journal of Law and Information Technology, and the Journal of Law and the Biosciences.
From 2011-2015, he chaired UK Biobank’s Ethics and Governance Council; and he was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2004-2010). He has been a member of working parties in the Academy of Medical Sciences (on ‘drugs futures’) and the Royal Society (on neuroscience and the law, and on machine learning); and he has acted as a specialist adviser to parliamentary committees on stems cells and hybrid embryos.
Christina Angelopoulos (University of Cambridge): Open Science and Copyright – the access and reuse issue
Thursday 6 March 2025, 18.00 (BST), Room BG110
Copyright is generally understood to protect the interests of authors and incentivise the creation of works. In the field of academic publishing, however, current practice requires the transfer or exclusive licensing of copyright from researcher-authors to the publishers of scientific journals – thus limiting access to the material experts need to produce research. While in an analogue world the distribution of print journals was essential for the dissemination of scientific information, digital technologies offer alternative options. In light of the ongoing serials crisis – i.e., the rising subscription costs for scholarly journals that strains academic institutions’ budgets – criticism has intensified. The consequences are particularly troublesome for publicly funded research, where the result is the appropriation of publicly funding by private entities. This reality underpins recent calls for release of publicly funded research under Open Access (OA). Various tactics to encourage OA publishing have emerged at both the legislative and non-legislative level. This presentation will examine the ways in which current European copyright law inhibits access to and reuse of scientific publications and considers possible solutions.
Dr Christina Angelopoulos is an is an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge, where she specialises in Intellectual Property Law. She is a member of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) and a Senior Member of Newnham College. She is also a regular visiting lecturer and researcher at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and a joint managing editor of the Kluwer Copyright Blog. Alongside her academic work, Christina has conducted work for the European Commission, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and various NGOs active in the field of copyright.
