This February, Natasha Mangal and Tamar Khuchua, doctoral students at CEIPI and EIPIN Innovation Society research fellows, presented their research findings as part of the Windsor University School of Law's LTEC & EIPIN-Innovation Society Lecture Series: Transnational IP Law and Innovation.
On February 12th, Natasha Mangal presented some of her Ph.D. research findings in her lecture titled “Rethinking Copyright Institutions: The Future of Regulation in a Digital Era.” In her presentation, she briefly outlined the methodology used throughout her work (comparative institutional analysis), which involved comparing EU institutions and their capacities/deficiencies in adapting EU copyright laws in response to a rapidly-evolving digital environment. Taking the recent implementation challenge of Article 17 CDSM Directive as an example, she demonstrated how an “institutional approach” adopted at the EU level might better serve the objectives of the Directive while opening up new possibilities for innovating in the area of online dispute resolution. She also briefly touched upon recent legislative developments in the U.S., highlighting the introduction of the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) within the U.S. Copyright Office as an example of the ever-expanding role of copyright administrative actors in other jurisdictions.
On 26th February, Tamar Khuchua talked about her main research findings concerning the European patent judiciary in her lecture entitled “European Patent Judiciary in the Light of the Emergence of the Unified Patent Court: Challenges and Debates”. First, she briefly addressed the broader harmonisation goals of the European Union rooted in the idea of the EU single market. Afterwards, she highlighted the issue of lack of uniform EU patent law and the divergence between the major European patent intensive countries’ national court systems. She employed the example of German, French and British courts’ differing elements as well as differences in the approaches the national courts may have towards substantive patent issues evidenced by case-law analysis. After underlining the lack of EU harmonisation in the field of patent enforcement in contrast to the other intellectual property fields such as trade mark law, Tamar reviewed the emergence of a single, centralised and specialised European patent Court – the UPC (Unified Patent Court) that has been intended to tackle the existing issues and uphold uniformity in the European Union. However, as this court has not yet been officially established and is facing controversial opinions, she proposed her approach towards the constitutive and structural issues that need to be overcome in order to make the UPC operational and respond to the harmonisation goals of the European Union in the field of intellectual property law in general and particularly in the field of patent law. Her blog post to be published at the Windsor Law Faculty of Law is coming up soon.
