Senior Law Lecturers Dr Hyo Yoon Kang and Dr Jose Bellido will lead Kent Law School as a research partner institution in a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant of Eur 2.2 million for investigating patents and their role in scientific infrastructure.
The five-year project ‘Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020’ begins in September 2017 and will be led overall by Professor Eva Hemmungs Wirten of Linkoeping University. It will encompass a collaborative and cross-disciplinary consortium including Katarina Nordqvist and Gustav Kaellstrrand (Nobel Museum) and Bjoern Hammarfelt (Boras University), with expertise in history, media and cultural studies, library sciences and law.
The project will explore the scientific use of patents, often given as a justification for the existence of patent law. It will also reveal the new and untold story of the networks of people, artefacts and money that have shaped the current knowledge infrastructure into its present form.
Dr Kang said: ‘We are tremendously excited to be part of a European team spanning multi-disciplinary expertise in order to explore patents in a different way than conventional law and economics scholarship. The five-year collaboration will allow us a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of how patents work or do not work in practice and find out more about their informational use and value by scientists themselves. To broaden the patent scholarship with such an accomplished group of researchers and range of institutions will contribute to a better evaluation of the patent system as a whole.’
Dr Bellido’s individual project will explore the historical question of copyright of patent document, which raise questions of authorship, ownership and transfer of patents as paper documents. Dr Kang’s project will assess whether patent documents are regarded and used as scientific information by scientists themselves and reveal scientists’ changing attitudes about the separation between pure and applied sciences. Both projects will be presented and discussed in three different workshops to be held in Europe and the US.
Dr Bellido and Dr Kang have previously collaborated with project members in two workshops; one held at the Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium, in 2015 and the other held at Linköping University, Sweden, in 2016. They are also Co-Pathway Directors of the Kent LLM Intellectual Property Law Pathway (a one-year Master’s in Law). This pathway provides a detailed insight into the dynamic and growing area of intellectual property law by taking a distinctively contextual approach. It also equips postgraduate students with the necessary in-depth knowledge to practise intellectual property law or work in creative industries. Watch Dr Bellido in the video below reflect on the multi-disciplinary nature of this pathway with one of his current students: