Professor Alain Pottage, NAB 7.21

LLM (Intellectual Property Law), MSc Biomedicine, Bioscience and Society and MSc Law, Anthropology and Society. The course is also available as an outside option where programme regulations permit and with the approval of the teacher responsible for the course.

This course is capped at 30 students. Students must apply through Graduate Course Choice on LSEforYou.

It is desirable that students should have had some prior knowledge of intellectual property, or that they should be taking one of the more specialized LLM courses in intellectual and cultural property offered by the Department.

This course takes a broadly historical, theoretical and contextual approach to the study of intellectual and cultural property law. It focuses on a set of topical questions that illuminate paradigms, institutional models and social and economic formations that cut across the diversity of intellectual and cultural property regimes; questions about the nature of property in intangible things, about the implications of the transnational expansion of intellectual property forms and institutions, about the role of comparative analysis in the study of intellectual property, or about how regimes forged in the era of industrialization have adapted to new modes of production and distribution. These expansive questions are not asked in abstraction. Seminars will focus on specific case studies of institutions, transactional forms and social effects. Many of these studies are chosen for their topicality, so the contents of the course will evolve from year to year, but seminar topics might include: the emergence of new regimes of open source biotechnology, the evolution of non-conventional trade marks such as scents, textures and shapes; the effects of regime-shifting between different international frameworks for the regulation of questions of intellectual property; the bases of emerging markets in cultural property and heritage; the re-emergence of old tensions between droit d'auteur and copyright in the context of open source licensing or human rights negotiations; the nature of 'negative spaces' (the fashion industry, magicians, manga and stand up comedy) within the otherwise pervasive order of intellectual property; the nature of the link between legal incentives and technological innovation; the usefulness of economic models in understanding the proprietary value of patents. The object of the course is to introduce key themes in critical debates about intellectual property, and to offer a set of conceptual resources that might be drawn upon in more specialized LLM courses in intellectual property.

20 hours of seminars in the MT and 20 hours of seminars in the LT. 4 hours of seminars in the ST.

One 2000-word essay in each of the Michaelmas and Lent Terms.

Bessen & Meurer, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk (2008); Biagioli, Jaszi & Woodmansee, Contexts of Invention (2009); Boyle, The Public Domain. Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (2009); Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (U Chicago, 1998); Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (2004); Miles, Art as Plunder. The Ancient Origins of Debate About Cultural Property (2008); Rose, Authors and Owners (1995); Sherman & Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law (1999); Towse and Holzhauer (eds.) Economics of Intellectual Property Rights, 4 Vols. (2002); Peter Yu (ed.), Intellectual Property and Information Wealth: Issues and Practices in the Digital Age 4 vols. (2007).

One 8,000 word extended essay (50%) and one two-hour examination (50%) in the ST. The extended essay will meet the LLM Writing Requirement.