As with a number of other Research Centres in Cambridge’s Faculty of Law, the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) is well known for the individual scholarship of its academics, their and its support of excellent research students and research visitors and the organisation of an active seminar series which has run throughout the past four years including during the years most affected by COVID-19.
Over the same period, CIPIL has engaged in a number of wider initiatives including its support of lectures, conferences and also resources for the intellectual property and information law community. Some of the more significant of these are highlighted below.
2020
CIPIL supported Cambridge’s 15th Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture delivered by Professor Rai (Duke Law School) on "Patents and Trade Secrecy in AI: The Case of Health", organised its Annual Spring Conference on "Is IP Good for Our Health?" and launched a database of national data protection laws from across Europe from the origins of such laws in the 1970s through to the present day and also a series of resources on EU and Council of Europe Data Protection and e-Privacy.
2021
CIPIL launched a comprehensive set of Reports exploring data protection’s interaction with freedom of expression and information and later expanded this to cover not only historic and contemporary statutory law but also constitutional/primary law at the pan-European level and in all EEA countries as well as Switzerland and the UK.
2022
Together with the Innovation and IP Management (IIPM) Laboratory, CIPIL sponsored the 17th Annual Conference of the European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Association which was held in the Faculty of Law.
2023
CIPIL supported Cambridge’s 16th Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture delivered by Professor Fromer (New York University) on "First in Intellectual Property Law", organised its Annual Spring Conference (which has been suspended in 2021 and 2022 due to COVID-19) on "Intellectual Property Rights as Allied Rights" held in memory of our friend and colleague Professor Bill Cornish and co-sponsored a further conference on "Private Law and Intellectual Property". CIPIL was also involved in setting up the Bill Cornish Memorial Fund to support doctoral research in intellectual property at Cambridge.
2024
CIPIL supported a Cambridge Price Media Law Moot team which won the competition’s European rounds in Paris, supported Cambridge’s 17th Annual International Intellectual Property Lecture delivered by Professor Bracha (University of Texas, Austin) on "Physicalism in Intellectual Property", organised its Annual Spring Conference on "Data Protection Reform" and launched a comprehensive archive of the EU’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party’s output across its history from 1997 to 2018.
Further information on the above and the range of other activities being pursued by CIPIL and its members is available through its X/Twitter account and its regularly updated website.