Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) Podcast

Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge
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The Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law CIPIL was founded in 2004. Through its activities, CIPIL aims to promote the investigation, understanding and critical appraisal of these important fields of law. The CIPIL Intellectual Property Seminar Series brings together specialist speakers to discuss prevailing issues in relation to copyright, patents, trademarks, design rights, and other subjects. The Centre brings together a group of legal academics already recognised for their historical and inter-disciplinary, as well as doctrinal, research. Drawing on the resources of Cambridge University, CIPIL is ideally positioned to carry out and promote well-informed interdisciplinary work. For more information see the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/

  1. FEB 13

    A Technology Perspective on Intellectual Property: CIPIL Evening Seminar

    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

    27 min

  2. FEB 6

    Property Framework and Copyright Maximalism: CIPIL Evening Seminar

    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

    38 min

  3. FEB 4

    Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age: CIPIL/CPL Lunchtime Seminar

    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/

    41 min

  4. FEB 3

    Should we care about GDPR Article 22?: CIPIL Evening Seminar

    Speaker: Tim Pitt-Payne KC, 11 Kings Bench Walk Biography: Timothy Pitt-Payne KC is a leading information law silk based at 11KBW where he has practiced since 1990. He was appointed QC/KC in 2010. His information law practice involves both litigation and advisory work in data protection, freedom of information, access to environmental information, RIPA, human rights issues, privacy, and breach of confidence. His clients have included commercial organisations, the Information Commissioner, numerous regulators, NHS bodies, local authorities, Universities, and private individuals. He has extensive advocacy experience in information law, at all levels from the First-tier Tribunal to the Supreme Court. In addition to information law, he is also active in both public law and employment law. Abstract: Article 22 of the UK GDPR prohibits certain forms of decision-making based solely on automated processing of personal data. This presentation considers the significance, scope, meaning and justification of Article 22 (as recently amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025). It argues that the provision should remain as part of the UK GDPR, although its scope may require modification. The provision is an outlier within the UK GDPR, in that it is focused specifically on decision-making, rather than on the full range of ways in which personal data can be processed. It applies to decision-makers in both the public and private sector. Much of the debate about the implications of automated decision-making has been focused on decision-making by judges or by public authorities; Article 22 is much wider in scope, with extensive impact on the private sector. I address some of the interpretative difficulties raised by Article 22. For instance, what minimum level of human involvement is required by Article 22? To what extent are any interpretative difficulties resolved by the recent amendments? In relation to the justification for Article 22, I assess possible arguments based on transparency, bias, responsiveness to individual circumstances, and risks of error. I argue that the most convincing justification is based on non-consequentialist arguments broadly relating to human dignity, founded on claims about inherent differences between human and machine capabilities. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

    41 min

  5. 11/24/2025

    Faithful or Traitor? The Right of Explanation in a Generative AI World: CIPIL Evening Seminar

    Speaker: Professor Lilian Edwards, Emeritus Professor of Law, Innovation & Society, Newcastle Law School  Biography: Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, privacy law and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985. She is now Emerita Professor at Newcastle and Honorary Professor at CREAte, University of Glasgow, which she helped co-found. She is the editor and major author of Law, Policy and the Internet, one of the leading textbooks in the field of Internet law (Hart, 2018, new edition forthcoming with Urquhart and Goanta, 2026). She won the Future of Privacy Forum award in 2019 for best paper ("Slave to the Algorithm" with Michael Veale) and the award for best non-technical paper at FAccT in 2020, on automated hiring. In 2004 she won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for work on online privacy where she invented the notion of data trusts, a concept which ten years later has been proposed in EU legislation. She is a former fellow of the Alan Turing Institute on Law and AI, and the Institute for the Future of Work. Edwards has consulted for inter alia the EU Commission, the OECD, and WIPO. Abstract: The right to an explanation is having another moment. Well after the heyday of 2016-2018 when scholars tussled over whether the GDPR ( in either art 22 or arts 13-15) conferred a right to explanation, the CJEU case of Dun and Bradstreet has finally confirmed its existence, and the Platform Work Directive has wholesale revamped art 22 in its Algorithmic Management chapter. Most recently the EU AI Act added its own Frankenstein-like right to an explanation (art 86) of AI systems . None of these provisions however pin down what the essence of the explanation should be, given many notions can be invoked here ; a faithful description of source code or training data; an account that enables challenge or contestation; a “plausible” description that may be appealing in a behaviouralist sense but might be actually misleading when operationalised eg to generate a medical course of treatment. Agarwal et al argue that the tendency of UI designers, and regulators and judges alike to lean towards the plausibility end, may be unsuited to large language models which represent far more of a black box in size and optimisation than conventional machine learning, and which are trained to present encouraging but not always accurate accounts of their workings. Yet this is also the direction of travel taken by CJEU Dun & Bradstreet , above. This paper argues that explanations of large model outputs may present novel challenges needing thoughtful legal mandates. For more information (and to download slides) see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

    49 min

  6. 11/07/2025

    Transformative Landscapes: How Generative AI is Shaping the Contours of US Copyright Law and Policy: CIPIL Evening Seminar

    Speaker: Professor Bhamati Viswanathan, Visitor, Cambridge Law Faculty and Fellow at the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School Biography: Bhamati Viswanathan is a Senior Visitor at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law and a Fellow (Non-Resident) at the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School (New York). Prior to joining the Cambridge Faculty of Law, she was Assistant Professor at New England Law | Boston, where she taught copyright law, artificial intelligence and the law, law and the visual arts, intellectual property law, and U.S. Constitutional law. She is the author of “Cultivating Copyright: How Creative Industries Can Harness Intellectual Property to Survive the Digital Age” (Routledge/Taylor & Francis Press). She currently holds an Edison Fellowship from the Intellectual Property Policy Institute at University of Akron Law School, under whose aegis she is writing a series of articles on the disparate impact of copyright law on women creators and women-centric work. She is also planning a book on the nexus of intellectual property and arts/culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Bhamati serves as Chair of the American Bar Association Intellectual Property Section: Visual and Dramatics Works Committee. She is a Faculty Advisor on the Copyright Alliance Academic Advisory Board. She serves as Faculty Partner to the News/Media Alliance. She is Education Advisor to the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA)/ Massachusetts Arts and Business Council. She is also a Faculty Advisor to the Journal of the Copyright Society; and she was a Trustee of the Copyright Society, as well as Chair of its New England Chapter. She holds an S.J.D./LL.M. from University of Pennsylvania Law School; a J.D. from University of Michigan Law School; and a B.A. from Williams College. She is a competitive figure skater, violinist, and published poet/translator and lives in Boston. Abstract: The training of generativeAI models on ingested work is a hotly contested area of U.S. copyright law. In this Seminar, I will inquire whether such training may constitute “fair use” under the nonexclusive four-factor test of the U.S. Copyright Act. Currently, courts are wrestling with the fair use defense in several major cases, including Thompson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence; Bartz v. Anthropic; Kadrey v. Meta; and the consolidated litigation of In re: OpenAI. Another open question is whether AI outputs infringe copyright in other works. Here, plaintiffs must establish that AI outputs infringe their works by passing the threshold of the “substantial similarity” test. I will discuss the test in the context of AI litigation, and will suggest that the relatively novel “market dilution” theory, focusing on harm caused by stylistically similar outputs, might be applied to weigh against a fair use defense for GenAI training. I will also address whether the theory of “vicarious liability” might be fruitfully brought to bear against certain genAI companies. Lastly, I will ask what action Congress can, or should, take, with a view to striking a fair balance between meeting the needs of innovative technologies and securing the rights of creative industries and creators. As an example, I will raise a recent proposal (in which I was involved) that Congress explicitly prohibit GenAI training on materials derived from digital repositories of unlicensed materials (so-called “shadow libraries”). For more information (and to download slides) see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

    54 min

  7. 10/31/2025

    Rethinking the 'Copy' in Copyright: CIPIL Evening Seminar

    Speaker: Dr Yin Harn Lee, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol Biography: Dr Yin Harn Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol. Her research interests lie primarily in copyright law. A significant part of her research focuses on copyright and videogames, and she is also interested in historical aspects of copyright as well as the interface between intellectual property and personal property. Abstract: The exclusive right to control the copying or reproduction of a work has been described by one leading copyright treatise as ‘the most fundamental, and historically the oldest, right of a copyright owner’. The first British copyright statute, the 1710 Statute of Anne, conferred on rightholders the exclusive right to print and reprint their books. Since then, the right has expanded far beyond its legislative origins, and now encompasses acts of copying in both digital and analogue form, those that are both temporary and permanent, and those that are merely incidental to the use of the work. Scholars have expressed concern about the now-expansive scope of the right, and there have been calls to restrict the right (e.g. by removing ‘non-expressive copying’ and copying that does not enable the use of the material in question ‘as a work’) or to replace it altogether with a broad right of ‘commercial exploitation’. This paper will show that, while these proposals are laudable and inventive, they nevertheless encounter the same pitfalls as those faced by English courts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when called upon to define the scope of what constitutes ‘copying’. It will argue that the root of the problem lies in the absence of stable, developed principles for defining the legitimate scope of the rightholder’s market, and that attempts at framing this as a question of statutory interpretation only obscure this fundamental fact. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

    55 min

  8. 10/17/2025

    Patents for Wellbeing: CIPIL Evening Seminar

    Speaker: Professor Andrew Christie, University of Melbourne Biography: Professor Andrew Christie was the foundation appointment to the Chair of Intellectual Property at the University of Melbourne in 2002.He holds BSc and LLB (Hons) degrees from the University of Melbourne, a LLM from the University of London, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College). Admitted to legal practice in Australia and the United Kingdom, he has worked in the intellectual property departments of law firms in Melbourne and London. He is a former Fulbright Senior Scholar, and has held research and teaching appointments at the University of Cambridge, Duke University, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Toronto. Awarded 12 Australian Research Council grants and instrumental in winning other research funding in excess of $11 million, he has authored more than 120 publications, and delivered by invitation more than 180 public addresses in 20 countries, across all areas of intellectual property law. He has served on all of the Australian government’s advisory committees on intellectual property – the Copyright Law Review Committee, the Advisory Council on Intellectual Property, and the Plant Breeder’s Rights Advisory Committee – and has been an expert advisor to World Intellectual Property Organization on a number of occasions. He currently chairs the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys Board, the regulator of the Australian and New Zealand patent attorney profession. Abstract: With more than 18 million patents for inventions in force across 140 jurisdictions, patents are a significant area of the law. However, the traditional justifications for having a patent system are incomplete, and do not take full account of developments in economic thinking that recognise the primary purpose of economics is to enhance human wellbeing. The primary purpose of patents should be likewise. There is sparse academic and policy literature on the relevance of wellbeing economics to patent policy, and what exists leaves unanswered many questions about how the patent system can be used to achieve this policy objective. This presentation answers those questions, by tracing the evolution of wellbeing economics, identifying the doctrinal levers available to implement patent policy, and providing practical examples of the application of those levers to ensure the patent system incentivises innovations that advance wellbeing. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

    1h 1m
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The Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law CIPIL was founded in 2004. Through its activities, CIPIL aims to promote the investigation, understanding and critical appraisal of these important fields of law. The CIPIL Intellectual Property Seminar Series brings together specialist speakers to discuss prevailing issues in relation to copyright, patents, trademarks, design rights, and other subjects. The Centre brings together a group of legal academics already recognised for their historical and inter-disciplinary, as well as doctrinal, research. Drawing on the resources of Cambridge University, CIPIL is ideally positioned to carry out and promote well-informed interdisciplinary work. For more information see the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/

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