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Email

pm753@cam.ac.uk

College Contact Details

Room: Room 6, Strathaird

Tel: 01223 332179

College Teaching Officer (Lucy Cavendish College)

Interests

Poorna’s research sits at the intersection of private law with intellectual property law. Her particular interests include property law, property theory, intellectual property law and generally the law relating to intangibles.

CV / Biography

Before taking up her current role, Poorna was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, a JRF at the Queen’s College, Oxford, and an academic member at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre. As a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford, she worked on the conceptual and doctrinal analogies that can be drawn from tangible property law, such as land law and personal property law, into copyright law to examine the extent to which this can assist copyright balance. A monograph drawn from this research entitled Copyright as Personal Property was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Poorna been a visiting scholar at Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia at Melbourne Law School, and E W Barker Centre for Law and Business at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, Project on the Foundations of Private Law at Harvard Law School and Centre for Private Law at Hong Kong University.

Her doctoral thesis was on implied licences in copyright law, where she analysed and applied principles of contract law to copyright law to develop a robust and predictive methodology for implying copyright licences. Her first monograph entitled Implied Licences in Copyright Law was published by Oxford University Press. Poorna's teaching interests extend to Land Law and Tort Law, although she has previously taught Contract Law and Equity. In 2026 she was elected the Vice-President of Lucy Cavendish College.

Poorna obtained her undergraduate law degree at NLSIU, Bangalore, and an LLM from SOAS, University of London for which she was awarded the Felix Scholarship. Before embarking on her doctorate, Poorna practised intellectual property law for several years in Hong Kong and was a litigator in India.

Selected publications

 

Books

Copyright as Personal Property (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Implied Licences in Copyright Law (Oxford University Press, 2021)

Articles

'Licence Fee Damages and the Nature of IP Rights' [2025] 38 Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 865

Citation:
[2025] 38 Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 865
Published: Aug 2025

'Possession in Copyright by Analogy' [2024] 140 LQR 277

Citation:
[2024] 140 LQR 277
Published: Apr 2024

'When the infringer is the contractual licensee' [2021] 43 European Intellectual Property Review 7-15

Citation:
[2021] 43 European Intellectual Property Review 7-15
Published: Feb 2021

'Form in Conceptualising Copyright as a Property Right' [2020] Journal of the Copyright Society of USA 301-326

Citation:
[2020] Journal of the Copyright Society of USA 301-326
Published: Aug 2020

'Does UK Really Have a ‘Closed’ List of Works Protected by Copyright?' [2019] 41 European Intellectual Property Review 474-479

Citation:
[2019] 41 European Intellectual Property Review 474-479
Published: Mar 2019

'Proprietary Estoppel and Copyright Law' [2018] 29 King’s Law Journal 470-495

Citation:
[2018] 29 King’s Law Journal 470-495
Published: Dec 2018

'Exhaustion, Non-Exhaustion and Implied Licence' [2018] 49 IIC 656-684

Citation:
[2018] 49 IIC 656-684
Published: Jun 2018

'Of Bollywood Songs, Film Producers and Collecting Societies: Locating the Rights of the Composers' [2014] 10 Indian Journal of Law and Technology 60-91

Citation:
[2014] 10 Indian Journal of Law and Technology 60-91
Published: Jun 2014

'A Pirate Too Needs to be Heard: Procedural Compromises in Online Copyright Infringement Cases in the UK' [2014] 3 Laws 553-579

Citation:
[2014] 3 Laws 553-579
Published: May 2014

'Unpacking the Right of Communication to the Public: A Closer Look at International and EU Copyright Law' [2013] Intellectual Property Quarterly 166-185

Citation:
[2013] Intellectual Property Quarterly 166-185
Published: Mar 2013

Book Chapters

"Data Licences" in Martin Dixon and Emma Lees (ed(s)), Modern Studies in Property Law (Hart Publishing, 2026), pp. 109-126

Publisher:
Pages:
109-126
Published Jun 2026

"Private Law, Intellectual Property Law and Right to Repair" in Jodi Gardner, Amy Goymour, Janet O'Sullivan and Sarah Worthington (ed(s)), Politics, Policy and Private Law (Hart Publishing, 2025), pp. 189-210

Publisher:
Pages:
189-210
Published Jun 2025

"The Duty of Good Faith" (with Manasi Kumar) in KV Krishnaprasad, Shuva Swaminathan, Umakant Varottil and V Niranjan (ed(s)), Foundations of Indian Contract Law (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 315-335

Pages:
315-335
Published Apr 2024

"Capturing the Dynamism of Fairness – A Common Law Perspective" in Daniel Gervais (ed(s)), Fairness, Morality and Ordre Public in Intellectual Property (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), pp. 8-29

Pages:
8-29
Published Jun 2020

Book Reviews

Review of the monograph by Patrick Goold, IP Accidents, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2022 [2022] 81 CLJ 687

Published Oct 2022

Review of the monograph by Patrick Masiyakurima, Copyright Protection of Unpublished Works in the Common Law World, Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2019 [2021] Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property 243-247

Published Apr 2021

Review of the edited volume by Enrico Bonadio and Nicola Lucchi, Non-Conventional Copyright, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 2018 [2019] Modern Law Review 1192-1197

Published Mar 2019

Case Notes

"Protecting the Unprotected Database" [2015] 131 Law Quarterly Review 556-562

Published: Jun 2015