2015

Roundtable Prof. Wendy Gordon

Round table seminar with Professor Wendy Gordon

20 January | Melbourne Law School

Wendy discussed two topics: the US Supreme Court’s approach to justifying copyright provisions that are challenged on Constitutional grounds, and US trends in protecting creative, attractive or distinctive products that are also functional. The presentation was followed by a lively discussion.

Professor Wendy J. Gordon has taught at Boston University since 1993, and was recently named to one of its ten William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships. An advisor to BU’s Intellectual Property Concentration, she also tremendously enjoys interdisciplinary dialogue. Her scholarship utilizes economics as well as both ethical and analytic philosophy to understand copyright, trademark, and related forms of property and tort law. Although based in BU’s School of Law, she has developed and co-taught courses with philosopher Aaron Garrett, Shakespearean actor Jonathan Epstein, and literary critic Sir Christopher Ricks. She is increasingly turning to art (fiction, opera, poetry, and narrative nonfiction) as an additional source of insight.

Ticking Boxes and Telling Stories

Ticking Boxes and Telling Stories: Privacy, Data Sharing, and the Construction of Identity

31 March | Melbourne Law School | Public Lecture

This public lecture suggested that we need to reconsider many of our ideas of identity and private space in order to make sense of a world in which identity is increasingly determined by the routine surveillance activities that now dominate our everyday lives.

Professor Ben Goold holds degrees in law and economics from the University of Tasmania, as well as a BCL and doctorate from the University  of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.His major research interests include privacy rights, the use of surveillance technologies by the police and intelligence communities, and the rhetoric and language of human rights. He is the author of numerous works on privacy, surveil¬lance, and security, including CCTV and Policing (Oxford University Press; shortlisted for the British Criminology Book Prize in 2005) and Security and Human Rights (Hart Publishing; edited with Liora Lazarus). Among his more recent publications are works on the social and political dimensions of privacy, the role of privacy enhancing technologies (PETS) in the regulation of public and private sector surveillance, and the relationship between human rights and constitutional responsibilities.

Defamation: Drafting Imputations

Dr Matt Collins QC

Chair and commentary: Professor Andrew Kenyon

This seminar was conducted in Melbourne and Sydney at Gilbert + Tobin.Melbourne

25 August, Sydney 26 August | Venue: Gilbert + Tobin | Melbourne | Sydney

The imputations said by the plaintiff to be conveyed by allegedly defamatory matter have a preternatural importance in defamation litigation in Australia—much more so than in other common law jurisdictions. The imputations, as pleaded in the statement of claim, frame the battleground between the parties, and operate as a curb on the defences available to publishers. Worthy plaintiffs can fail at trial because of defects in their pleaded imputations; and a publisher’s fate can rest in the competence with which the plaintiff’s imputations have been drafted. The crafting of imputations is thus fundamental to the skillset of the defamation practitioner.This seminar took the form of a practical and interactive workshop. As well as addressing precepts for the good drafting of imputations, and the implications of getting it wrong, there was a practical exercise that enabled participants to try their hand at drafting imputations and obtain feedback.

Data Privacy Should We Worry?

30 September | Melbourne Business School

This seminar took the form of a practical and interactive workshop involving experts from business, computer systems, law and regulation debating the costs and benefits of current practices and legal standards.

Karin Clark was Special Counsel with Allens and practised for many years in the firm’s Communications, Media and Technology Practice Group special- ising in advising on compliance with privacy laws. She is currently a Senior Fellow in the Melbourne Law Masters teaching Privacy Law.

Lars Kulik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. His current areas of research and expertise include sensor networks, mobile computing, location privacy, spatial algorithms and spatial data mining.

Ujwal Kayande is interested in how customers make decisions, and how firms can improve their marketing and business actions. He is a Professor of Marketing at the Melbourne Business School and Director of its Centre for Business Analytics.

Megan Richardson is a Professor of Law at the Melbourne Law School and Co-Director of its Centre for Media and Communications Law and the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. Her research interests are centred especially on privacy and data protection.

Kwanghui Lim is an Associate Professor at the Melbourne Business School and Co-Director of the In- tellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. He researches on the strategies used by firms to manage knowledge, both in tangible and intangible forms.

This discussion was a joint CMCL and IPRIA initiative

IP & Media Law Conference

23 & 24 November | Melbourne Law School

Papers were presented from researchers in law, media studies, IP and related fields for this international conference.

Keynote speakers:

Professor Graeme Austin Victoria University of Wellington and University of Melbourne

Professor Joshua Gans University of Toronto

Professor Sonia Katyal University of California, Berkeley

Professor Beate Roessler University of Amsterdam

Professor Julian Thomas Swinburne University, Melbourne

Panels included:

The future of IP research – Prof Andrew Christie, Dr Benjamin Mitra-Kahn, Prof Beth Webster, Prof Peter Yu

Trade mark confusion – Assoc Prof Chris Dent, Prof Jill Klein, Assoc Prof Kimberlee Weatherall

The internet of things – Dr Rachelle Bosua, Assoc Prof Kwanghui Lim

Topics covered: Amateur media and user-generated content - - - Broadband futures - - - Competition - - - Content creation, use and re-use - - - Convergence - - - Copyright and speech - - - Data and surveillance - - - Defamation and public debate - - - Design cultures and practices - - - Digital publics - - - Free speech - - - Intermediaries, responsibility, control, neutrality - - - Journalism and popular media - - - Measuring and valuing IP - - - Media representations of law - - - Networks and networking - - - Patents and economy - - - Privacy and publicity - - - Privacy by design- - - Public knowledge - - - Public media - - - Reporting courts - - - Strategic uses of IP - - - Surveillance and security - - - Technology and IPRs - - - Trademarks - - - and more…