IP Provocations

IP Provocations is made with the support of IP Australia - we’re grateful to have had the opportunity to ask such broad ranging questions about the patent system to such interesting people, and get so many surprising answers. The IP Provocations team had full academic freedom in designing these conversations, and the views expressed are those of the individual speakers.

This podcast is a project of IPRIA, the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, and had additional support from Melbourne Law School and Sydney Law School. The music was composed and recorded by Nina Buchanan. The hosts are Professors Rebecca Giblin and Kimberlee Weatherall, and research support was provided by barrister Amy Surkis. The producer is Greta Robenstone. Anders Furze filled in all the remaining gaps.

This podcast was produced on stolen land - sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.

Original music for IP Provocation was created by Nina Buchanan

Your hosts

Rebecca Giblin

ARC Future Fellow Director, Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA)

Rebecca Giblin (she/her) is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor at Melbourne Law School, and the Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. Her work sits at the intersection of law and culture, focusing on creators’ rights, access to knowledge and culture, technology regulation and copyright. Giblin’s books include Code Wars (2011) and What if we could reimagine copyright? (with Professor Kimberlee Weatherall, 2017). Her newest book, Chokepoint Capitalism, (co-authored with Cory Doctorow, 2022) explains how Big Tech and Big Content captured creative labour markets, and how we can take them back.

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Kimberlee Weatherall

Professor, The University of Sydney Law School

Kimberlee is a Professor of Law at the University of Sydney focusing on the regulation of technology and intellectual property law, and a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. She is a Fellow at the Gradient Institute, a research institute developing ethical AI, and a research affiliate of the Humanising Machine Intelligence group at the Australian National University, and a co-chair of the Australian Computer Society’s Advisory Committee on AI Ethics.

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Episode #6 // The wrap-up

In the season one finale of IP Provocations, we’re joined by barrister Amy Surkis to reflect on the series and ponder what we’ve learned. Amy is an expert IP barrister and was our stellar research assistant this season. We chat about what has surprised us and stuck with us from across the series. In particular, we unpack the interplay between patent systems, and broader socio-economic systems, and the extent to which patent laws replicate existing inequalities. How does the patent system act as a feedback loop, rewarding wealth and privilege with more wealth and privilege? And what can we do about it?

Episode #5 // On Australia's First inventors - and living sustainably together

In this very special episode of IP Provocations, Rebecca and Kim talk to Larissa Behrendt about First Nations innovation - and what we can learn from the people who lived sustainably in the land now known as Australia for over 65,000 years.
Drawing upon the themes of Behrendt’s new documentary series The First Inventors, Behrendt speaks about how First Nations’ technologies can tackle climate change, and how Indigenous storytelling, governance and kinship systems are integral to First Nations innovation. She talks about First Nations invention as an entire system of cultural knowledges and understandings sitting outside the Western IP system, and how The First Inventors highlights best practice, Indigenous-led research collaboration.

Episode #4 // Greed v Need: Does the patent system incentivise the right things? Part Two

In part 2 of this extended conversation with activist Achal Prabhala and the WTO’s Tony Taubman, we pick up where we left off, asking if the approach taken to the Medicines Patent Pool could also be used to drive our response to the climate emergency. 
We then tackle a host of thorny patent issues. Should we focus on the distribution of knowledge, and not just generating more of it? Just how bad is the problem of patent trolls? Why are Moderna and Pfizer facing messy legal disputes over the IP behind COVID-19 vaccines? What did the controversial TRIPS waiver actually do? And what are the limits of patents in incentivising innovation?

Episode #3 // Greed v Need: Does the patent system incentivise the right things? Part One

This episode’s guests are Antony Taubman Director of the Intellectual Property, Government Procurement and Competitive Division of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)and Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School, and Achal Prabhala, a Bangalore-based activist, writer, researcher and filmmaker.
Our chat centres around the pharmaceutical industry. How are skewed incentives prioritising the lives of rich people over poor people? How is the patent system like high jumping?  What impact is the UN’s Medicines Patent Pool having on equalising access to medicine? And are universities falling into the trap of seeing patents as the most important validation of their research agenda?

Episode #2 // Inventors are white men - or are they? Patents, race and gender

In 2022, just 1.8 per cent of Australian patent applications were by all-women teams, but half were all-male teams, according to research from Dr Vicki Huang.
In this episode of IP Provocations, we dig into the question of who the system recognises as inventors, and who it excludes. What is the correlation between patent protection and racial violence? Why is the stereotypical image of an inventor so often a white man like Thomas Edison or Elon Musk? And if the patent system excludes certain types of knowledge while favouring others, is it really doing its job of ensuring we all benefit from great ideas?
This episode’s guests are Dr Anjali Vats Associate Professor of Law, with a secondary appointment in Communication, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and Dr Jessica Lai Associate Professor in the School of Accounting and Commercial Law at the Victoria University of Wellington.

Episode #1 // Is patent law writing cheques it can’t cash?

In this first episode of IP Provocations, we drill experts Janet Freilich and John Liddicoat about the extent to which the promises patent law makes match up with what happens in practice. Is the system working as it’s supposed to? Are patents incentivising the types of innovation we want most? Do we still see scientific breakthroughs without them? What would happen if every patent was actually enforced? And why on earth do people go to the effort of maintaining patents long after they realise the invention they’re protecting is useless?