Lex Ferenda

(1) Supported by CREATe, here’s a fascinating workshop on artificial intelligence and the law, organised by my Edinburgh colleague Prof. Burkhard Schafer:

Ever since Larry Lessig’s proposal to understand “Digital Rights Management” as a form of regulation through code, the field of copyright in the digital economy has opened up a new field of research questions for Artificial Intelligence and Law. How can we represent in more intelligent and semantically richer ways legal concepts that ensure that all, and only, lawful use can be made of digital objects such as film clips or music tunes? How can Information Retrieval support e-discovery in IP litigation? How can we support through technology creators and digital businesses to manage their IP rights, or to use third party material in a law-compliant way? These are just a few of the questions that offer new and exciting applications for artificial intelligence in a legal context.

The call for papers closes this week, so do get in touch; the workshop itself is in December.  All of the details are available here.

(2) My former colleagues at the ESRC Centre for Competition Policy have a good opportunity for someone about to complete a PhD or with one recently in the bag – a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at a leading interdisciplinary centre (law, economics, business, political science) for academic research on competition and regulation.  Even for someone who only scraped the surface of CCP issues during my time there, it was a very vibrant, provocative group to work with – and if your interests are within the Centre’s research programme, it would be a pretty great chance to immerse yourself in relevant academic activity:

The Centre is a focus of research into Competition and Regulation across a range of disciplines, and welcomes applications in the area of competition or regulation policy from candidates with a strong background in competition law, industrial economics, or Political Science related to competition policy or regulation. Post doctoral fellows are expected to contribute to the Centre’s research individually and to develop joint research with other Centre members.

I appreciate that this is mentioned in various places on the Internet but i haven’t said it here, so…

Next week will be my last week at the University of East Anglia, where I have been since August 2008.  UEA has been a great place to work and the development of media@uea has been particularly fun to be involved in – and I will certainly miss my colleagues in the UEA Law School and elsewhere in the university.

Next month, I’ll take up a new post at the University of Edinburgh, as ‘Lecturer in the Law of Digital Media’.  I’ll be joining a great group of people, including those in the SCRIPT centre, and teaching on various courses, including the distance learning LLM programmes.  I’m looking forward to it, and will post more about what I’m doing up north over the course of the summer.

My colleagues in the ESRC Centre for Competition Policy are all set for this week’s event on media plurality, taking place in Westminster Hall at 5pm on Wednesday 23rd May.  There are a very small number of places still available, so if you would like to attend, please contact Suzy Adcock and say that you saw this blog post.

The event is co-organised by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, and panel speakers include those from the print media (e.g. journalist and editor Peter Preston), from broadcasting (e.g. David Elstein), and from politics (e.g. Charles Clarke, former MP and Home Secretary).  It promises to be a very engaging and frank debate and I am looking forward to it.

I’ve written about this week’s two TripAdvisor stories (Conor Pope’s piece on an Irish hotel group in the Irish Times and the ASA’s ruling on TripAdvisor’s marketing claims) over on the blog of the Centre for Competition Policy. I talk about the legal status of reviews posted by businesses who claim to be consumers (which I wrote about on Lex Ferenda – was it really five years ago?), and the reason why the ASA found against TripAdvisor for what was a statement on its own website.

Read the full post here.

Now available via ‘advance access’ (institutional login required) to the Journal of IP Law & Practice (JIPLP) is my colleague Prof. Christopher Wadlow‘s barnstorming piece on Marmite, the BNP and the law, The Marmite Election. I had the pleasure of hearing the ‘live’ version of this piece earlier in the year, and it has already received a good deal of informal praise (including from those outside of law – note the use of semiotic theory and cultural studies alongside the expected doctrinal legal analysis). Aside from the thorough analysis of a range of trademark, copyright and passing off issues, including the relationship between these points and freedom of political expression, the reader will also find a remarkably wide range of references to authors, bands and musicians (from Florence & the Machine to Morrissey via Vera Lynn and Samuel Beckett), the X Factor and snowclones (to name but a few) in the text and footnotes. It’s also quite funny, and as such is an appropriate way for JIPLP to mark the end of another busy year. Enjoy!