Intellectual property for the 21st century

Over the past two decades, globalization, digitization, and the rise of the Internet have each contributed to a new prominence for intellectual property law in public policy debates around the world. Questions about how intellectual property is controlled, licensed, used, and reused are all part of a growing public discourse that now engages far more than an elite cadre of lawyers. Because intellectual property law now trenches so deeply on issues of economics, culture, health, commerce, creativity, and intellectual freedom, it is no surprise that there is also a burgeoning literature on intellectual property issues that comes, not just from legal academics or lawyers, but from those trained in other disciplines. In the spring of 2012, the Centre for Law, Technology, and Society at the University of Ottawa hosted a workshop that sought to bring together academics from different disciplines interested in intellectual property law in order to stimulate discussion across disciplines, to encourage the development of collaborative efforts, and to produce a body of research that explores intellectual property law issues from explicitly interdisciplinary perspectives. The collection of papers in this book is the product of this workshop.