Dr Martin Husovec

Other Staff Involved: Prof Andrew Murray NAB 6.08

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is capped at 30 students. Students must apply through Graduate Course Choice on LSEforYou.

The course examines the law and policy issues relating to a number of key aspects of online piracy, copyright protection and other forms of intellectual property rights (IPRs). At the end of the course, students should be able to:

• critically evaluate ongoing developments in law relating to IPRs and the digital environment;

• display an understanding of how these developments relate to one another;

• examine areas of doctrinal and political debate surrounding rules and theories;

• evaluate those rules and theories in terms of internal coherence and practical outcomes;

• draw on the analysis and evaluation contained in primary and secondary sources.

The speed of technological innovation means that even as laws and regulatory practices are formulated, they are already under pressure from the next wave of development. One of the greatest challenges of the digital environment has been the compression and transmissibility of all data including entertainment data such as music, movies, TV shows and video games. For more than twenty years the entertainment industries have found themselves under continuous assault from their own customers and have often been painted as the villains of the piece. Lawyers and lawmakers have been forced to respond, often following behind the technology.

This class explores how legislators, regulators and those in the entertainment and luxury products industries interact in their attempts to develop a coherent and flexible body of law and regulatory practice for an increasingly globalised environment. This will involve consideration of current and potential legal and regulatory strategies that can be used to achieve aims such as protection of copyright content, software, luxury branded goods and the battle between open source and proprietary software.

20 hours of seminars in the LT. 2 hours of seminars in the ST.

There will be a Reading Week in Week 6.

All students are expected to contribute to a series of class exercises, and to submit to one one-hour mock exam.

Murray: Information Technology Law: The Law and Society 4ed (OUP, 2019)

Husovec: Injunctions against Intermediaries in the European Union: Accountable but Not Liable? (CUP, 2017)

Koo: The Right of Communication to the Public in EU Copyright Law (Hart, 2019)

Klein, Moss & Edwards: Understanding Copyright Intellectual Property in the Digital Age (Sage 2015)

Rosati: Copyright and the Court of Justice of the European Union (OUP, 2019)

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours, reading time: 15 minutes) in the summer exam period.