Dr Siva Thambisetty NAB 7.29

This course is available on the Executive LLM. This course is not available as an outside option.

This course will be offered on the Executive LLM during the four year degree period. The Department of Law will not offer all Executive LLM courses every year, although some of the more popular courses may be offered in each year, or more than once each year. Please note that whilst it is the Department of Law's intention to offer all Executive LLM courses, its ability to do so will depend on the availability of the staff member in question. For more information please refer to the Department of Law website.

Patent rights are the link between your index finger that slides or twirls to open your smartphone, a synthetically generated living cell, the diagnostic test for breast cancer, the velcro on your gym bag and the connectivity we often take for granted on social media. Over the last two decades patents have moved from an obscure, arcane subject to being the main stay of domestic and international debates spanning issues as wide ranging as innovation policies, access to medicines, international trade and development, ethical implication of biological research and commercialisation and the sustainable use of genetic resources.

This course will critically examine core concepts of the protection of inventions in UK/European, US and International patent law often taking a comparative perspective. We examine specific industrial or technology sectors such as software, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. The course takes a broad approach to questions of patentability, and through readings and discussion you will investigate the economic and political dimensions of the use, control and exploitation of technology and innovation and the impact of structural inequalities. This year 2021 in particular, the devastating effects of the pandemic invites us to contemporaneously  study the effort to provide vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 and analyse what it teaches us about the intersection between market incentives like patents and structural inequality.

You do not need prior exposure to intellectual property law or a science background to take the course. You will be supported throughout the course to understand technologies via their legally significant attributes.

24-26 hours of contact time.

Students will have the option of producing a formative exam question of 2000 words to be delivered one month from the end of the module’s teaching session by email.

Bently, Sherman, Gangjee and Johnson Intellectual Property Law, OUP 2018, Pila The Requirement for an Invention in Patent Law Oxford University Press 2010, Spence Intellectual Property, Clarendon Law Series 2007, Landes and Posner The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law Harvard University Press 2003, Robert Merges Justifying Intellectual Property Law HUP 2011, Jaffe & Lerner, Innovation and its Discontents Princeton University Press 2004.

Assessment path 1
Essay (100%, 8000 words).

Assessment path 2
Take-home assessment (100%).