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Speaker: Dr Julia Möller-Klapperich, Freie Universität Berlin Abstract: Art is, first and foremost, something deeply personal, yet at the same time a form of communication that is relevant to society. Copyright law therefore balances between the interests of the artist and those of society. If something has relevance within a market economy, it can in general be monetised. Whilst innovation is increasingly understood politically as the ability to capitalise a personal or societal need, the democratising effect that characterises art as a human phenomenon and as a space for societal resonance is visibly eroding, giving way to a digitalisation-driven centralisation of what is publicly perceptible and, with it, a concentration of power on an unprecedented scale. Legal science must counter this development, to develop meaningful concepts of innovation through interdisciplinary discourse, and to design legal rules that take appropriate account of the social functions of art and AI. The issue of memorisation lies at the heart of this conflict and is therefore highly controversial. The European Commission has recently launched a consultation on the challenges and way forward regarding the impact of technology on copyright. While the legislature is assessing the situation, courts — including those in Germany — must decide on various cases based on current legislation. It remains unclear whether representing information extracted from copyright-protected works in an AI model constitutes a reproduction under copyright law. In two notable rulings, German courts have ruled in favour of a collecting society that initiated legal proceedings against AI providers. The decisions focus on establishing the facts and proving a physical reproduction as depicted in the model. However, the problem is that due to the technical functioning of the model, this physical reproduction cannot be identified within it. For this reason, the literature considers that, at least in a technical sense, no reproduction has taken place. This talk attempts to shift the discussion from establishing the facts to legal interpretation in cases where the facts cannot be sufficiently clarified. This approach is based on the balance of interests embodied in copyright law. Furthermore, the allocation of responsibilities between the courts and the legislature in addressing unclear technological issues is considered in the assessment. Biography: Dr. Julia Möller-Klapperich, LL.M., is the Academic Director of the Master's programme in Business, Competition and Regulatory Law at Freie Universität Berlin, where she is also a Habilitandin. She holds a Master's degree from Dresden University of Technology and a PhD from the Technical University of Freiberg. Prior to joining FU Berlin, she was a research associate at the Scads.AI AI competency centre Dresden/Leipzig. Her main research focus is the regulation of emerging technology markets. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Chair: Professor Markus Gehring, CELS This seminar and book discussion will focus on how artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding the supply of legal reasoning, but how it does not by itself produce justice. Superjustice asks what legal systems should look like when constraints of scarcity, delay, and inconsistency can increasingly be relaxed by computation. Rather than simply digitising existing institutions, Benjamin Alarie and Samuel Becher argue in their new OUP book with the same title for redesigning law as a more accessible, responsive, and adaptive framework for human flourishing. The talk and discussion will explore how AI could make legal guidance more broadly available, support more dynamic and personalized legal systems, and change the roles of judges, lawyers, educators, and policymakers. It will also confront the harder questions raised by this transformation, including bias, transparency, privacy, procedural justice, and institutional legitimacy. Speaker: Benjamin Alarie is the Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto and co-founder and CEO of Blue J, an AI platform for tax used at thousands of accounting and law firms. He has spent more than a decade applying artificial intelligence to tax and law and coined the term “legal singularity” in 2016. In addition to Superjustice (Oxford University Press, 2026) he is co-author of The Legal Singularity (University of Toronto Press, 2023), which won the 2024 AAP PROSE Award and was shortlisted for the Donner Prize. He holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Louise Arbour. Discussants: Dr Emilija Leinarte, Deputy Director of CELS, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a fellow of Corpus Christi CollegeProfessor Christoph Winter is Assistant Professor of Law and AI at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), University of Cambridge For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Speaker: Lisa P. Ramsey, Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law Professor Lisa P. Ramsey, Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and an expert on trademark law, will be speaking on her new book, Trademarks and Free Speech: Conflicts and Resolutions (CUP: 2026). This book explores how trademark laws can conflict with the right to freedom of expression and proposes a framework for evaluating free speech challenges to trademark registration and enforcement laws. It also explains why granting trademark rights in informational terms, political messages, widely used phrases, decorative product features, and other language and designs with substantial pre-existing communicative value can harm free expression and fair competition. Lisa Ramsey encourages governments to not register or protect broad trademark rights in these types of inherently valuable expression. She also recommends that trademark statutes explicitly allow certain informational, expressive, and decorative fair uses of another’s trademark, and proposes other speech-protective and pro-competitive reforms of trademark law for consideration by legislatures, courts, and trademark offices in the United States, Europe, and other countries. You can order a copy of the book from CUP’s website here, using the code RAMSEY25 at checkout for a 20% discount. Biography: Lisa P. Ramsey is a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law, where she teaches and writes in the intellectual property law area. She is an expert on trademark law and has given presentations on this topic to attorneys, professors, and students throughout the United States and around the world. Professor Ramsey’s scholarship focuses on potential conflicts between trademark laws and free speech rights, and explains how trademark protection of certain inherently valuable words, symbols, and product features can harm fair competition and freedom of expression. In 2024, she testified at a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's Intellectual Property Subcommittee about the First Amendment implications of a proposed anti-impersonation law targeted at unauthorized digital replicas called the No FAKES Act. She has also talked about free speech limits on trademark rights on panels at San Diego Comic-Con in 2023 and 2024. Professor Ramsey is an active member of the American Intellectual Property Law Association and worked on the subcommittee that updated the International Trademark Association’s Model Trademark Law Guidelines in 2019. Before joining the USD law faculty in 2004, she was an intellectual property litigator at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich and a judicial law clerk for the Honorable Rebecca Beach Smith in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. In July 2025, she was named a Women of Influence in Law 2025 Honoree by the San Diego Business Journal. Information about her publications is available on her website at www.lisapramsey.com. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Speaker: Professor Leah Grinwald (Dean and Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, University of Nevada) Session 3: Comparative Experience and Potential Reform On Saturday 21 March 2026, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) held its Annual Spring Conference entitled 'Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights' In Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Wright [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch), [63], Mellor J. observed “IP rights, being monopolies of various sorts, are … justified in that their net benefit is in the public interest, with a view to fostering creativity and innovation. By corollary, where IP rights are abused to stifle creativity and innovation, the legal system ought to have the means to respond effectively.” The statement raises three questions which are the subject of this conference: (i) when are IP rights to be regarded as “abused”? (ii) What mechanisms exist to respond to such abuses? And (iii) Does the legal system have sufficient mechanisms by which to “respond effectively”? Programme: Abuses (This session not recorded) - Abuses of Trade Marks – Stuart Baran (3 New Square) - Abuses of Designs – David Stone (White & Case) - Abuse in FRAND Patent Litigation – Daniel Alexander KC (8 New Square) Current Disinventives and Remedies - Remedies for Abuses: Actions for Threats – Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird) - Preventing Misuse of interim injunctions: The Cross-Undertaking - Dr Katarina Foss-Solbrekk (University of Copenhagen) - Remedies for Abuses: The Role and Limits of Competition Law to Prevent Enforcement of Invalid IPRs– Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square) - Preventing Abuses: Ethical Obligations of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys – Phil Barnes (BarnesIP) Comparative Experience and Potential Reform - Does the UK Need a Distinct Doctrine of Abuse of Right? – Lessons from the Civil Law – Dr Amandine Leonard (University of Edinburgh) - Abuse of IP Rights. Lessons from the United States? Professor Leah Grinwald (Dean and Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, University of Nevada) For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-spring-conference

Speaker: Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird) Full title: 'Does the UK Need a Distinct Doctrine of Abuse of Right? – Lessons from the Civil Law' Session 3: Comparative Experience and Potential Reform On Saturday 21 March 2026, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) held its Annual Spring Conference entitled 'Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights' In Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Wright [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch), [63], Mellor J. observed “IP rights, being monopolies of various sorts, are … justified in that their net benefit is in the public interest, with a view to fostering creativity and innovation. By corollary, where IP rights are abused to stifle creativity and innovation, the legal system ought to have the means to respond effectively.” The statement raises three questions which are the subject of this conference: (i) when are IP rights to be regarded as “abused”? (ii) What mechanisms exist to respond to such abuses? And (iii) Does the legal system have sufficient mechanisms by which to “respond effectively”? Programme: Abuses (This session not recorded) - Abuses of Trade Marks – Stuart Baran (3 New Square) - Abuses of Designs – David Stone (White & Case) - Abuse in FRAND Patent Litigation – Daniel Alexander KC (8 New Square) Current Disinventives and Remedies - Remedies for Abuses: Actions for Threats – Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird) - Preventing Misuse of interim injunctions: The Cross-Undertaking - Dr Katarina Foss-Solbrekk (University of Copenhagen) - Remedies for Abuses: The Role and Limits of Competition Law to Prevent Enforcement of Invalid IPRs– Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square) - Preventing Abuses: Ethical Obligations of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys – Phil Barnes (BarnesIP) Comparative Experience and Potential Reform - Does the UK Need a Distinct Doctrine of Abuse of Right? – Lessons from the Civil Law – Dr Amandine Leonard (University of Edinburgh) - Abuse of IP Rights. Lessons from the United States? Professor Leah Grinwald (Dean and Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, University of Nevada) For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-spring-conference

Speaker: Phil Barnes (BarnesIP) Session 2: Current Disincentives and Remedies On Saturday 21 March 2026, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) held its Annual Spring Conference entitled 'Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights' In Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Wright [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch), [63], Mellor J. observed “IP rights, being monopolies of various sorts, are … justified in that their net benefit is in the public interest, with a view to fostering creativity and innovation. By corollary, where IP rights are abused to stifle creativity and innovation, the legal system ought to have the means to respond effectively.” The statement raises three questions which are the subject of this conference: (i) when are IP rights to be regarded as “abused”? (ii) What mechanisms exist to respond to such abuses? And (iii) Does the legal system have sufficient mechanisms by which to “respond effectively”? Programme: Abuses (This session not recorded) - Abuses of Trade Marks – Stuart Baran (3 New Square) - Abuses of Designs – David Stone (White & Case) - Abuse in FRAND Patent Litigation – Daniel Alexander KC (8 New Square) Current Disinventives and Remedies - Remedies for Abuses: Actions for Threats – Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird) - Preventing Misuse of interim injunctions: The Cross-Undertaking - Dr Katarina Foss-Solbrekk (University of Copenhagen) - Remedies for Abuses: The Role and Limits of Competition Law to Prevent Enforcement of Invalid IPRs– Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square) - Preventing Abuses: Ethical Obligations of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys – Phil Barnes (BarnesIP) Comparative Experience and Potential Reform - Does the UK Need a Distinct Doctrine of Abuse of Right? – Lessons from the Civil Law – Dr Amandine Leonard (University of Edinburgh) - Abuse of IP Rights. Lessons from the United States? Professor Leah Grinwald (Dean and Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, University of Nevada) For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-spring-conference

Speaker: Dr Katarina Foss-Solbrekk (University of Copenhagen) Session 2: Current Disincentives and Remedies On Saturday 21 March 2026, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) held its Annual Spring Conference entitled 'Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights' In Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Wright [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch), [63], Mellor J. observed “IP rights, being monopolies of various sorts, are … justified in that their net benefit is in the public interest, with a view to fostering creativity and innovation. By corollary, where IP rights are abused to stifle creativity and innovation, the legal system ought to have the means to respond effectively.” The statement raises three questions which are the subject of this conference: (i) when are IP rights to be regarded as “abused”? (ii) What mechanisms exist to respond to such abuses? And (iii) Does the legal system have sufficient mechanisms by which to “respond effectively”? Programme: Abuses (This session not recorded) - Abuses of Trade Marks – Stuart Baran (3 New Square) - Abuses of Designs – David Stone (White & Case) - Abuse in FRAND Patent Litigation – Daniel Alexander KC (8 New Square) Current Disinventives and Remedies - Remedies for Abuses: Actions for Threats – Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird) - Preventing Misuse of interim injunctions: The Cross-Undertaking - Dr Katarina Foss-Solbrekk (University of Copenhagen) - Remedies for Abuses: The Role and Limits of Competition Law to Prevent Enforcement of Invalid IPRs– Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square) - Preventing Abuses: Ethical Obligations of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys – Phil Barnes (BarnesIP) Comparative Experience and Potential Reform - Does the UK Need a Distinct Doctrine of Abuse of Right? – Lessons from the Civil Law – Dr Amandine Leonard (University of Edinburgh) - Abuse of IP Rights. Lessons from the United States? Professor Leah Grinwald (Dean and Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, University of Nevada) For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-spring-conference

Speaker: Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird) Session 2: Current Disincentives and Remedies On Saturday 21 March 2026, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) held its Annual Spring Conference entitled 'Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights' In Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Wright [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch), [63], Mellor J. observed “IP rights, being monopolies of various sorts, are … justified in that their net benefit is in the public interest, with a view to fostering creativity and innovation. By corollary, where IP rights are abused to stifle creativity and innovation, the legal system ought to have the means to respond effectively.” The statement raises three questions which are the subject of this conference: (i) when are IP rights to be regarded as “abused”? (ii) What mechanisms exist to respond to such abuses? And (iii) Does the legal system have sufficient mechanisms by which to “respond effectively”? Programme: Abuses (This session not recorded) - Abuses of Trade Marks – Stuart Baran (3 New Square) - Abuses of Designs – David Stone (White & Case) - Abuse in FRAND Patent Litigation – Daniel Alexander KC (8 New Square) Current Disinventives and Remedies - Remedies for Abuses: Actions for Threats – Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird) - Preventing Misuse of interim injunctions: The Cross-Undertaking - Dr Katarina Foss-Solbrekk (University of Copenhagen) - Remedies for Abuses: The Role and Limits of Competition Law to Prevent Enforcement of Invalid IPRs– Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square) - Preventing Abuses: Ethical Obligations of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys – Phil Barnes (BarnesIP) Comparative Experience and Potential Reform - Does the UK Need a Distinct Doctrine of Abuse of Right? – Lessons from the Civil Law – Dr Amandine Leonard (University of Edinburgh) - Abuse of IP Rights. Lessons from the United States? Professor Leah Grinwald (Dean and Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, University of Nevada) For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-spring-conference

Speaker: Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square) Session 2: Current Disincentives and Remedies On Saturday 21 March 2026, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) held its Annual Spring Conference entitled 'Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights' In Crypto Open Patent Alliance v Wright [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch), [63], Mellor J. observed “IP rights, being monopolies of various sorts, are … justified in that their net benefit is in the public interest, with a view to fostering creativity and innovation. By corollary, where IP rights are abused to stifle creativity and innovation, the legal system ought to have the means to respond effectively.” The statement raises three questions which are the subject of this conference: (i) when are IP rights to be regarded as “abused”? (ii) What mechanisms exist to respond to such abuses? And (iii) Does the legal system have sufficient mechanisms by which to “respond effectively”? Programme: Abuses (This session not recorded) - Abuses of Trade Marks – Stuart Baran (3 New Square) - Abuses of Designs – David Stone (White & Case) - Abuse in FRAND Patent Litigation – Daniel Alexander KC (8 New Square) Current Disinventives and Remedies - Remedies for Abuses: Actions for Threats – Trevor Cook (Bird and Bird) - Preventing Misuse of interim injunctions: The Cross-Undertaking - Dr Katarina Foss-Solbrekk (University of Copenhagen) - Remedies for Abuses: The Role and Limits of Competition Law to Prevent Enforcement of Invalid IPRs– Dr Quentin Schaefer (11 South Square) - Preventing Abuses: Ethical Obligations of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys – Phil Barnes (BarnesIP) Comparative Experience and Potential Reform - Does the UK Need a Distinct Doctrine of Abuse of Right? – Lessons from the Civil Law – Dr Amandine Leonard (University of Edinburgh) - Abuse of IP Rights. Lessons from the United States? Professor Leah Grinwald (Dean and Richard J. Morgan Professor of Law, University of Nevada) For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-spring-conference

The nineteenth Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture was delivered by Professor Ruth Okediji, Jeremiah Smith. Jr, Professor of Law; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University on Tuesday 17 March 2026. The lecture entitled 'Thirty Plus One: TRIPS, Innovation, and the Political Future of Minimum IP Standards' took place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/

Speaker: Associate Professor David A. Simon, Northeastern University School of Law Biography: David A. Simon, J.D., LL.M., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law, where he teaches courses on tort law, administrative law, and drug & device regulation. Professor Simon’s research focuses on innovation in healthcare, with an emphasis on drugs and devices. His work has appeared or will appear in a variety of publications, including the Texas Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, the Emory Law Journal, the Georgia Law Review, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, the Journal of Law & the Biosciences, JAMA, Nature Biotechnology and the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics. A complete list of Dr. Simon’s publications is available on his CV . Professor Simon is the Principal Investigator on the Project on Medical Device Safety and co-director of the Amy J. Reed Collaborative for Medical Device Safety, funded by Arnold Ventures. He is also a member of the UIUC CLASSICA research team, a project funded by the European Union. He has previously served on the faculties of Harvard Law School, George Washington University Law School, and the University of Kansas School of Law. During histime at Harvard Law School, he led a three-year project at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics dubbed Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Home Health, and funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Professor Simon is also a founder of two nonprofits—Harmed Americans for Reform in Medical-Device Safety and Project TCF20—and a practicing member of the Illinois and Massachusetts Bars. Abstract: Copyright law grants authors special non-economic “moral rights” to prevent others from using their works in certain ways. In their strongest “solipsistic” form, moral rights give the author the absolute power to prevent any use that offends her sensibilities. While the solipsistic view of moral rights exists in only a few countries, the sentiment underlying it is pervasive in moral rights theory: an author’s claims are superior to all others because only the author knows when harm occurs, regardless of others’ views. In other words, certain uses of works result in the author experiencing harm that no one else can experience and that does not depend on what others think. This Article asks and evaluates the following question: can harm based only on the author’s subjective experience justify solipsistic moral rights? It argues that the answer is probably not—and that, if supported, solipsistic moral rights will be tightly limited. Drawing on literature in science fiction and philosophy, this Article. contends that the best justification for the monastic view is also the most implausible: authors have moral rights only when another’s use causes the author to experience an inconsistency between her perceived use of the work and her memories of creating the work. In short, an author’s rights are contingent on her ability to remember creating her work. This is the best justification because the author’s memories of creating the work satisfy all the requirements for authorial harm: it identifies discrete psychological states that are tied directly and only to the author’s acts of creation, independent of others’ perceptions. It is the least plausible, however, because it conditions important rights on one’s ability to remember past actions. Despite its seeming implausibility, the author’s memories of creation provide the best support for grounding monastic moral rights. As a consequence, the case for monastic moral rights, if it can be made, is tightly limited to cases where another’s use of an author’s work causes a negative psychological response directly tied to the author’s memories of creating the work. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Speaker: Dr Christopher Stothers, Partner at Freshfields in London and Dublin Biography: Christopher Stothers is a partner at Freshfields in London and Dublin and an experienced patent litigator, managing strategic, cross-border disputes around Europe and beyond for over 20 years. He has acted as a legal practitioner in many oppositions and appeals before the European Patent Office and as a UPC Representative in several local divisions and the Court of Appeal. He supervised IP students at Downing and St Catharine’s between 2004-2007, and since then has taught part-time at UCL where he is an Honorary Professor of Practice. Abstract: International patent law has undergone piecemeal harmonisation over many years, from WIPO’s Paris Convention of 1883 through the Strasbourg Convention of 1963, the Patent Cooperation Treaty of 1970, the European Patent Convention of 1973, the (never ratified) Community Patent Conventions of 1975 and 1989, the TRIPS Agreement of 1994, the London Agreement of 2000 and the UPC Agreement of 2013. Despite these efforts, patent porfolios are typically still maintained and enforced on a strategic territorial basis, which in bigger cases often leads to cross-border disputes, particularly over standard essential patents and important pharmaceutical patents. The last decade has seen the re-emergence of cross-border enforcement by courts, including retaliatory anti-suit, anti-anti-suit, anti-enforcement and now anti-interim licence injunctions. Christopher has been involved in cross-border patent enforcement for over 20 years and will talk about the changes he has seen (and what is coming in the future). For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Speaker: Dr Svitlana Lebedenko, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick and part-time Assistant Professor at the European University Institute. Biography: Dr Svitlana Lebedenko specialises in innovation and industrial policy, law and technology, and intellectual property law. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Law at the University of Warwick and a part-time Assistant Professor at the European University Institute, contributing to the Global Governance Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. Previously, she was a Hauser Global Fellow at New York University School of Law's Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, a Research Fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Copenhagen's Center for Advanced Studies in Bioscience Innovation Law. Her first book, Russian Innovation and Intellectual Property: From Communism to Capitalism, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2026. Abstract: Intellectual property has mainly been studied from the institutional and systems perspectives. While both have produced useful insights, neither really explains the spread of intellectual property, which, despite its numerous institutional failures, has never been rolled back. The talk introduces a technology perspective on intellectual property to provide a macro-level explanation of this phenomenon of resilience. Two propositions arise from conceptualising intellectual property as a technology. First, the efficiency and neutrality theses of technology serve as intellectual property anchors. Second, the evolutionary nature of technology means that changes to the tools of knowledge governance that may occur are likely to be bound by the limits of the dominant technological (intellectual property) paradigm. The talk will conclude by considering the descriptive and normative value of this technology perspective. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Speaker: Dr Poorna Mysoor, CIPIL, University of Cambridge Biography: Dr Poorna Mysoor is a Fellow in Law at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Oxford Law Faculty. She is the author of two books, Copyright as Personal Property (2025) and Implied Licences in Copyright Law (2021), both published with Oxford University Press, and of other peer reviewed journals articles. Poorna obtained her undergraduate law degree at NLSIU, Bangalore, LLM from SOAS, University of London and DPhil from Oxford Law Faculty. Before embarking on her doctorate, Poorna practised intellectual property law for several years in Hong Kong and was a litigator in India. Abstract: Many scholars argue that recognising copyright as a property right leads to expansion. The argument is that property rights empower the owners disproportionately with little regard to the interests of other stakeholders. In this presentation the speaker seeks not only to debunk this argument to show instead the limiting role played by property rights and its impact on copyright. Drawing from her recently published monograph, ‘Copyright as Personal Property’ the speaker will put forward relevant analogies from land law and personal property law in support of her arguments. She seeks to demonstrate tat copyright expansion can indeed be reined in by adopting, and not disregarding, the property framework in the characterisation of copyright. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Speaker: Professor Jon Penney (Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto) In this talk, Jon Penney explores key themes from his new book Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which examines the increasing weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and new technology to repress and control us. With corporations, governments, and extremists employing big data, artificial intelligence, FRT, cyber-mobs, and other technological threats to limit our rights and freedoms, concerns about chilling effects—or how these activities deter us from exercising our rights—have become urgent. Penney draws on law, privacy theory, and social science to present a new conformity theory that highlights the dangers of chilling effects and their potential to erode democracy and enable a more illiberal future. Following the book’s urgent and timely message, he sheds light on the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and tomorrow. Biography: Jon Penney is a legal scholar and social scientist at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, where he is an Associate Professor and holds the York Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, Data Governance, and the Law. He is also a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. His award-winning research on privacy, technology, and human rights has received national and international attention, including coverage in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters International, The Guardian, and Le Monde, among others, and has been profiled in WIRED and Harvard Magazine. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars https://www.cpl.law.cam.ac.uk/