Season 1

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.
We also raise the story of David Unaipon’s extraordinary inventiveness. A Ngarrindjeri man of the Coorong region, Unaipon invented a dazzling array of technologies in the early 20th century. He came up with the idea for a vertical flying machine based on boomerang aerodynamics over a decade before helicopters were invented, and his revolutionary approach to sheep shearing technology generated a huge amount of wealth for white Australians, transforming the economy at the time. You can see the patent for his sheers in the openings to all our video episodes! Read more about Unaipon in this piece written in Pursuit.
Larissa Behrendt is a Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman. She is an award-winning author and filmmaker, a lawyer and the Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the host of ABC Radio National show Speaking Out. She is the director of The First Inventors, a four-part series that tells the story of First Nations innovation. You can read more about all of Behrendt’s work at her website.
If you’re in Australia, you can watch The First Inventors on a href='https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-series/the-first-inventors'>SBS On Demand or Ten Play.

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?
This episode’s guests are:
Antony Taubman is Director of the Intellectual Property, Government Procurement and Competitive Division of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a position he has held since 2009. He is also a Senior Fellow (Melbourne Law Masters) at the Melbourne Law School.
Archal Prabhala is a Bangalore-based activist, writer, researcher and filmmaker. He is the coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa.

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

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?
Find more information on the Medicines Patent Pool.
This episode’s guests are:
Antony Taubman is Director of the Intellectual Property, Government Procurement and Competitive Division of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a position he has held since 2009. He is also a Senior Fellow (Melbourne Law Masters) at the Melbourne Law School.
Achal Prabhala is a Bangalore-based activist, writer, researcher and filmmaker. He is the coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa.

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.
It’s a remarkable statistic. 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 is Associate Professor of Law, with a secondary appointment in Communication, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She is the author of The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (Stanford University Press, 2020), which argues that US intellectual property myths are structured by implicit and explicit racialised understandings of who counts as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ intellectual property citizen, and thus deserves to be rewarded with intellectual property rights. Read more about Anjali at her University of Pittsburgh profile and read more about her book at Stanford University Press.
Dr Jessica Lai is Associate Professor in the School of Accounting and Commercial Law at the Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author of Patent Law and Women: Tackling Gender Bias in Knowledge Governance (2022, Routledge), which analyses the gendered nature of patent law and the knowledge governance system it supports. Read more about Jessica at her Victoria University profile and more about her book at Routledge.
We also discussed Dr Vicki Huang’s research into patents and gender in Australia.

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

Welcome to IP Provocations! In this first episode, 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?
IP Provocations is hosted by the Melbourne Law School’s Professor Rebecca Giblin, and the University of Sydney’s Professor Kimberlee Weatherall. Read more about Giblin’s work and Weatherall’s work.
This episode’s guests are:
Professor Janet Freilich is a Professor of Law at Fordham University. Prior to entering academia, she practiced as a patent litigator and prosecutor. You can read Freilich’s paper on the replicability crisis in patent law. We also discussed her paper on patents’ new salience, which looks at how the patent system has potentially worked precisely because it is underenforced, and how that’s now changing thanks to AI and other technology.
Dr John Liddicoat is senior lecturer in law at King’s College, London. He is particularly interested in biotechnology and life-sciences, and the role patent law plays incentivising innovation in these areas. We covered Liddicoat’s research into how hospital and university trials actually increase once generic drugs are authorised.