Faculty Member, Law
Professor of International Governance
About
Current position
I joined the Law School at Leeds in 2007. I am Director of our LLM in Intellectual Property Law, which we launched in 2009. (See www.law.leeds.ac.uk/postgraduates/taught-postgraduates/llm-intellectua
Other positions
My positions outside Leeds include Research Affiliate of the Intellectual Property Law and Technology Program at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto (www.iposgoode.ca/). I am also an Adjunct Professor at the Center for Studies of Intellectual Property Rights at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China. I am a member of the IPBio Network (www.ipbio.org) based here at Leeds (for our conference presentations, see www.youtube.com/user/TheIPBioNetwork), and am on the Scientific Advisory Board of a Canadian synthetic biology project called PhytoMetaSyn (www.phytometasyn.org) . I have a D.Phil. in Geography from Oxford University. (Supervisors: Prof. David Vaver and Dr. Tom Downing).
Previous posts
From 2002 to 2007, I was Herchel Smith Senior Research Fellow in Intellectual Property Law at Queen Mary, University of London. From 2001 to 2002, I was Academic Director of the UNCTAD-ICTSD Capacity-building Project on Intellectual Property Rights and Development, based in Geneva. (www.iprsonline.org/unctadictsd/description.htm). During much of the 1990s I worked with the late Darrell Posey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_A._Posey) at Oxford University to establish a Programme for Traditional Resource Rights.
Research themes
My whole academic career has been spent in law departments. However, I regard myself as a social scientist whose body of work and research interests spread across various disciplines. My research orientation ranges from the theoretical to the highly practical and policy-related. Most of my research and published outputs to date, and those planned for the coming years, fall within three broad thematic areas.
1. The Law, Science and Business of "Bio-technical Innovation" from the Scientific Revolution to the Present
The present era is marked by the rapidly growing ambitions of biological scientists to modify, harness and synthesise living systems. As the science changes, the life science industries will undergo transformations too, as they have always done in the past. These advances will point the way to amazing new commercial possibilities. Some of the longest established business models will become obsolete. Alongside and supporting these developments is a growth both in financial investments and in the lodging of intellectual property claims. These present and near future scenarios give rise to some very big questions, such as: How should society respond? How far should such work be encouraged? What should good laws, regulations and policies look like? Is the current scenario unprecedented, or have we been here before? And if the latter is the case, what lessons did we learn that could be applied to the present?
This research brings together several fields of enquiry, including law, biology, anthropology, history of science, geography, philosophy and linguistics. There are two integral areas of focus. The first examines evolving ideas and rules governing attribution, property, rights and duties. It confronts such vital issues as whether humans can and should try to make nature qualitatively – and perhaps also morally – better, and whether this is something individual people are able to achieve and for which they are entitled to material or other rewards. Intellectual property is of immense importance. Patents are supposedly an incentive to invest in innovation in the face of huge cost and tremendous risk. But which lines of life science research do we want to encourage and discourage? Are intellectual monopoly privileges necessary to ensure the innovation gets done? Or are such legal monopolies harmful? These questions are hotly debated and remain unresolved.
The second concerns the metaphors and analogies used either unthinkingly or strategically to communicate our understanding of life, our control over it, and our interests, rights and duties in relation to it. Language and figures of speech are incredibly important in molecular biology and in the relevant laws and regulations. In what ways are they helpful in terms of explanation, understanding, decision making, and policy making? In what ways do they obfuscate, mislead and generate perverse choices and policies?
I have also been fortunate to be able to engage directly with the science community through my role as member of the Scientific Advisory Board of PhytoMetaSyn, a five-year synthetic biology project funded by Genome Canada which seeks to reconstruct metabolic pathways responsible for producing valuable plant chemicals in microorganisms such as yeast. While consolidating and advancing my research and “policy-influencing” in the above fields, I also intend to explore further the past, present and future links between intellectual property and creativity especially in the life sciences.
2. The Past, Present and Future of Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property
The second of my themes focuses on one type of product and industrial sector: pharmaceuticals. It investigates the co-evolution of the relevant sciences, businesses and business strategy, and intellectual property from the industry’s origins, largely in the synthetic dyestuffs firms of the late nineteenth century, to the present and future. Apart from law, the research incorporates economic and business history. Much of my research falls within a subject area (discipline?) that I would like to call “History of pharmaceutical intellectual property”, a title that I hope other scholars working in this field will adopt. I say intellectual property rather than patents because this industry is also heavily dependent on trade marks. One of the key arguments I make is that modern patent law has to a large extent been shaped by the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries of the past. My book Intellectual Property Rights and the Life Science Industries (now in its second edition) is the main outcome of the work done so far. I intend to do an expanded third edition that will establish the title as the global reference work for the subject.
3. Global Intellectual Property Law and Policy
My co-authored book Global Intellectual Property Law has been adopted as a primary text on international intellectual property law for undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The expanded second edition will be published in early 2013. Within this theme, two forthcoming articles are “Plant intellectual property, food security and human development: institutional and legal considerations, and the need for reform”; and “The limits of substantive patent law harmonization”. The former concerns the importance of reforming international institutions relevant to the protection of plant variety protection in the interests of enhancing food security. The second argues against the harmonisation of substantive patent law on the grounds that it would harm the interest of developing countries. Another new article is “Structure-function analysis of global pharmaceutical linkage regulations” (co-authored with Ron Bouchard as lead author). It explains how new regulatory regimes are currently being deployed to extend legal monopolies on drugs throughout the world, even when there are no patents. In terms of the wider impact of my work in this area, I have been involved in influencing policy through my long-term collaborations with Geneva-based diplomats, governments, intergovernmental organisations and NGOs that in some cases go back to the early 1990s. I have consulted for various international organisations and governments, most recently the South African Parliament. In 2009 I drafted several intellectual property laws for the government of Zambia. These are currently going through the national parliament.
Current book projects
1. Owning Life: How We Transformed the World and Became Authors and Owners of Life (tentative title).
This book deals with how human creativity has impacted on the evolution of life, with the development of our understanding of such impacts, and with what this understanding implies for our sense of human identity. It covers, too, how such understanding has translated into property relations and become a matter of intense political, philosophical and theological debate. So far I have written two chapters, and completion may take some time!
2. Knowledge Management and Intellectual Property: Concepts, Actors and Practices. (Dutfield & Arapostathis (eds.)), Edward Elgar, 2012.
This history of science collection investigates changing patterns of knowledge management and the making of intellectual property regimes in various techno-scientific disciplines and cultures, covering the period 1850-present.
3. Global Intellectual Property Law. Second Edition.
(Dutfield & Suthersanen), Edward Elgar.
You won't find any of my papers on SSRN (unless somebody else put them there!). But you will find some of my work on this site - with more to come.
Contact Information
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