Synopsis
To what extent can copyright law, long understood as a statutory and regulatory institution, be understood through the methods and ideas of the common law? As generally understood, the common law refers to the body of rules made principally by courts from within the context of individual cases, and in an incremental manner. In this presentation, Professor Balganesh will argue that the purposes, ideals and analytical bases of copyright law are best understood using the common law. Copyright’s functioning as a market-based incentive for creativity, its contextual balancing of protection and access, its peculiar structure of liability (for infringement), and its very ideal of authorship—can each be understood as instantiating various ideas that have been well developed in different parts of the common law. Using the common law to understand copyright sheds important light on how we might approach the issue of copyright reform, and institutional and structural directions that such reform might take. Professor Calboli will moderate the presentation.
Speaker's Profile
Shyam Balganesh is a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he is also a Co-Director of the Center for Asian Law. His scholarship focuses on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His most recent work examines how the concept of causation in the law could be fruitfully deployed to understand the idea and working of authorship in copyright. While at Yale Law School, he was an Articles & Essays Editor of the Yale Law Journal and a Student Fellow at the Information Society Project (ISP). Prior to that he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. Recent articles include: “ Causing Copyright,” Columbia Law Review (forthcoming 2017), "The Questionable Origins of the Copyright Infringement Analysis," Stanford Law Review (2016), "Copyright and Good Faith Purchasers," California Law Review (2016), "Structure and Value in the Common Law," University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2015, "Gandhi and Copyright Pragmatism," California Law Review (2013), “The Obligatory Structure of Copyright Law: Unbundling the Wrong of Copying,”Harvard Law Review (2012).
Programme
2.30pm - Registration
3.00pm – Workshop
4.00pm – Discussion
4.30pm - Refreshments and End of Event
Public CPD Points - 1 point
This programme is an Accredited CPD Activity under the SILE’s CPD Scheme. Participants who wish to claim CPD Points are reminded that they must comply strictly with the Attendance Policy set out in the CPD Guidelines. This includes signing-in on arrival and signing-out at the conclusion of the activity in the manner required by the organiser, and not being absent from the entire activity for more than 15 minutes. Participants who do not comply with the Attendance Policy will not be able to obtain CPD Points for attending the activity. Please refer to http://www.silecpdcentre.sg for more information.
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Last updated on 04 Aug 2016 .
