Dr Martin Husovec

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 has a limited number of places and demand is typically high. This may mean that you’re not able to get a place on this course.

The course examines how law and other regulatory systems incentivise creativity and investment in the digital space and with what consequences. Legislatures around the world constantly face the question of what intangible assets to protect and how to support social progress. The general intuition is that protecting from imitation is necessary to incentivise creativity and investment that are in everyone’s interest. Several recent examples include potential protection of data, AI-generated creations, computer programs, and digital news.

The course provides a broad view of how legal incentives, social norms, technical architecture, and markets shape the legal design of new forms of protection of intangible assets. It draws on a number of recent policy developments in Europe and around the world to study when and by what means legislators decide to protect new digital assets from imitation and appropriation. It explores how legislators, regulators and industries interact in their attempts to develop a coherent and flexible body of law and regulatory practice.

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, academic 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.

This course will have two hours of teaching content each week in Winter Term and an additional two hours of teaching in the Spring Term. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

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

Academic papers by scholars of law, economics, and other social sciences, such as Alexrod, Coase, Husovec, Hugenhotlz, Lemley, Mazzucato, Moser, and many others

Justin Pila and Paul Torremans, European Intellectual Property Law (OUP 2019)

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

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