The LL.M. Subject Forum is an event held at the beginning of each academic year to help current LL.M. students decide which courses to take. Course convenors for each course discuss for approximately 10 minutes the goals and objectives of their course. Potential applicants to the LL.M. viewing this video must bear in mind the students who were in the audience were intended as the target audience. Most of the courses offered each year will run in subsequent years, but not necessarily all of them. Please see The LL.M. Curriculum for more information.

Transcript

My name is Lionel Bently and I’m going to talk to you a little bit about two courses: the intellectual property law course and the international intellectual property law course of which, I think, I am the convenor of both. I certainly am teaching quite a lot on both of these courses.

So probably most of you are here because you already know a little bit about intellectual property, what it is. If you don’t, let me just say a couple of things about what intellectual property is about. IP, as people like to abbreviate intellectual property to, is the law concerning creations of the human intellect. So, for example, books, songs, films, computer programs and then also technological inventions, chemicals, machines, medicines and so on.

Intellectual property law also covers various other associated rights, in particular rights in relation to trademarks, so signs or logos that are used in trade to identify one business or one concern as the source of goods or services and also trade secrets, information relating to businesses, sometimes information relating to ideas for new inventions or ideas for new forms of cultural artefact, but sometimes also just common or garden information about customers or prices. These sorts of things are the subject matters of rights that are conferred, either by statute or under the common law, and those rights are the subject of intellectual property.

To me, intellectual property is really exciting because of the breadth of subject matter it covers. One minute, you might be discussing whether two stripes of paint on a pop singer’s face constitute a painting. Another minute, you might be asking the question whether a smell can be registered as a trademark. Yet again, you might be asking whether a genetically modified organism, a mouse modified when it was only in its embryonic stage so that the mouse would get cancer, you are asked to consider whether that is something that is an invention that should be patentable or whether it is in fact contrary to public policy or morality. So we have a huge range of subject matter and that makes it quite an exciting and interesting topic.

Who is going to teach on the IP course? Well, it is going to be three of us: myself, Isabella Alexander, who’s at Robinson, and Eleanor Cooper, who is a junior research fellow at Trinity Hall. I don’t know quite how this has occurred but I seem to be teaching quite a lot of it. I’m teaching patents, trademarks and the trade secrets component and I also do the lecture which will be on Thursday morning which is the introductory lecture at 11:00 am. Isabella Alexander who is a fantastic, relatively young, copyright scholar and has published an excellent book on copyright history during the 19th century, she will take the copyright section and from past experience, I can tell you that she is a very clear and much liked teacher, in contrast to me.

Then we also have Eleanor Cooper, also a recent PhD student, I think she finished her PhD a year or two ago or got her PhD about a year ago and she’ll come in and do a couple of lectures on passing off. She also, from last year, I know, was thought to be an incredibly good and effective lecturer as well as a thoroughly nice person.

So, that’s who’s going to teach and what’s going to be taught. When are we going to do it? We’re going to have lectures from 11:00 until 1:00 on Thursday and in addition, we will have small groups, assuming that the lecture group is substantial as it has been in previous years; we will also have small groups that will probably meet every two or three weeks. We’re going to organise that using Cam Tools system, so you will be able to sign up for the small groups and Isabella is going to be at the class tomorrow to take us through that.

The IP course is focused on all areas of IP but is primarily British law in its orientation. Having said that, there is no such thing as purely British IP law anymore. There are a few areas, trade secrets, passing off, where British law is relatively uninfluenced by international or regional laws but on the whole, IP is an area that has been subjected to large amounts of European harmonisation and is also the subject of international treaties. As a consequence of that, the IP course, even though it is focused on British law, will require you to understand a lot of European trademarks law and an increasingly large amount of European copyright law as the various copyright directives start to be interpreted by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Finally, in relation to this course, the question arises do you need to know anything in advance? Do you need to have done IP before? Do you need to know or understand science? The answer to that is no we don’t expect you to know IP already. We’re teaching you intellectual property. You will have to do lots of work by yourself, that’s inevitable, that’s the nature of doing an LL.M so you will have to be able to learn by yourself as well as from the classes. As regards the question of whether you need a science background, the answer is no. I have nothing that I would particularly call a science background but I have taught patent law on a number of occasions before and I indeed do a little bit of patent practice, usually thankfully with other people who understand the science but you don’t need to have a science background but a science background will help you understand the cases that you have that background in better than if you didn’t, I am sure.

That’s intellectual property. I have another ten minutes to talk about international intellectual property which is the second course on the LL.M on which I teach. This one is taught by myself and Catherine Seville who is from Newnham College and is an expert particularly on aspects of European intellectual property law and on copyright history. You’ll see we have a lot of copyright historians here. What is the difference between international and UK intellectual property law? Well, not surprisingly, international intellectual property law concerns itself with the international norms and standards that exist in relation to the field and there are a number of different relevant treaties that have existed in this field since the 1880s, have been revised on a number of occasions, so those would be the Berne Convention dealing with copyright, the Paris Convention dealing with patents and trademarks and the Madrid Agreement dealing with processes for registration of trademarks. However, there have also been many other treaties since the end of the nineteenth century as well as revisions of those treaties. The most important of the treaties since is the 1994 TRIPS Agreement which brought intellectual property rights within the aegis of the world trade organisation.

In addition to examining those international norms, we also look at other forms of international norms relating to IP such as, for example, soft law recommendations of organisations concerned with IP such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation. Now the international IP course is concerned with the international norms but it steps back and asks various questions in relation to those norms. It asks you to reflect upon them and to consider why certain areas of IP are harmonised when others are not. What are the problems with international harmonisation? Is it a good idea to have one standard for intellectual property throughout the world or do different countries with different cultural and economic backgrounds needs flexibility to have variations from those standards as many people think and what is the interaction between these international IP standards and national regional and international norms of different sorts, such as freedom of expression norms, access to health norms and so on.

So we start off with a focus on the international treaties but there will be seminars which deal with topics of IP on a comparative basis, where there is no internationalisation at all. So, for example, I have been planning for this year to have a seminar in the second term on questions of patent ownership and employee rights to remuneration when patented inventions turn out to be particularly valuable. There are many different national systems offering compensation to employees in these circumstances. There are some systems that don’t offer any compensation and there is no international norm available there and so that would be a good example of the situation where there was no international norm and we would be asking the question why aren’t there international norms in this area? Should there be international norms in this area? If there were to be international standards on this topic, what would be an appropriate standard and so on.

So those are the sorts of things that we will deal with in the course. How will we deal with them? Well we will deal with… There is no textbook for this course. It is a course that varies, not substantially but varies from year to year so there will be things on the course this year that weren’t on the course last year and vice versa. There would be things on the course last year that won’t be reappearing this year. This is so that we can keep it fresh and interesting and reflect the interests of the people that happen to be teaching it and so I am currently interested in this question of employee invention, so we will have a seminar on employee inventions and it fits with the themes we are trying to develop but the bad news for you in that respect is no text book. So you get the reading lists and you go and have to look at the things, get the documents, and fetch the articles, etc., yourself. Of course, they will be made available so that they are as accessible to you as possible but it still means that it’s not as convenient for you as those who just like to rely on a text book.

In contrast, for the intellectual property course, there are now a range of different text books. Some of them have been compiled by people who you’ll be taught by. For example, I wrote a text book on IP, the last edition was in 2008 and my predecessor in this post in Cambridge, Bill Cornish, also has a text book that is in a more recent seventh edition, I think from 2009 or 2010. For the IP course, those text books would be a good starting point but it is essential for you to be prepared doing an LL.M to reach a high standard to go and reach, to read the cases, develop your own ideas and to bring them back to class.

For both courses, you would need to have a statute book. The statute book that we recommend is edited by Christie and Gare and is Blackstone’s statutes on IP and it contains both the national legislation, the regional legislation and the international norms by and large so you will usefully have them all in one place if you purchase that book.

Both these courses are examined at the end of the year by a three hour exam and you would be expected to answer three questions in three hours. The exams are open book exams and that means that you can take the materials that you have collected from the lectures and so on, as well as your statute books into the exam and you can refer to them if necessary. Open book exams sound like they are going to be easier for you but I don’t think that is really the case. Nobody in their right mind can afford to be spending very much of the three hours they have available to them in an exam looking things up so really I’ve always thought open book exams were a good idea but I think they’re a good idea because they take a little bit of stress from you. That worry that comes with not remembering the case name and so on but they are no greater advantage than that.

The international IP course, finally I should say, it is better if you know something about IP before you do the international IP course because we are not going to take time up explaining any of the basics to you. However, if you want to do it and haven’t studied IP previously, I recommend to you that you pick up an introductory book on IP and read it through this weekend. So take Saturday and Sunday off, buy Jennifer Davis’ Introduction to IP and read it back to front and then you will probably be in as good a position as you would be if you had done an IP course as an under-graduate anyway and then had plenty of time to forget it.

Okay, so I have taken up 18 out of my 20 minutes which leaves two minutes for you to ask questions about what I should have said but have left out. Well, if any of you who came in after the first five minutes, which was about three quarters of you, I think, have any questions for me, you can email me. I’ll put up my email address, that’ll be 329 and I will happily answer them. Otherwise, I believe this tape is going to be put on line so that even though you missed the first five minutes and there wasn’t anything fascinating there but if you’re interested, you can listen to the first five minutes. I won’t be doing that because I still hate hearing myself on tape.

Alright, I’ll see some of you tomorrow. I didn’t tell you, the international IP course is Wednesday, 9:00 am, which is earlier than anybody really should be thinking about IP but it’s the designated time. Thanks.

Added on 05/10/2011.

Last modified on 11/10/2011

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