Senior Law Lecturers Dr\u00a0Hyo\u00a0Yoon Kang and Dr Jose\u00a0Bellido\u00a0will lead Kent Law School as a research partner institution\u00a0in\u00a0a\u00a0European Research Council\u00a0Advanced Investigator Grant of Eur 2.2 million for investigating patents and their role in scientific infrastructure.<\/p>\n
The five-year project \u2018Patents as Scientific Information, 1895-2020\u2019 begins in September 2017 and will be led overall by Professor Eva\u00a0Hemmungs\u00a0Wirten\u00a0of\u00a0Linkoeping\u00a0University. 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.<\/p>\n
The project will explore the scientific use of patents, often given as a justification for the existence of patent law. It will also reveal\u00a0the new and untold story of the networks of people, artefacts and money that have shaped the current knowledge infrastructure into its present form.<\/p>\n
Dr Kang<\/a> said: \u2018We 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.\u2019<\/p>\n Dr Bellido<\/a>\u2019s individual project will explore the historical question of copyright of patent document, which raise questions of\u00a0authorship, ownership and transfer of patents as paper documents. \u00a0Dr Kang’s project will\u00a0assess whether patent documents are regarded and used as scientific information by scientists themselves and\u00a0reveal scientists\u2019 changing attitudes about the separation between pure and applied sciences. Both projects will be presented and discussed in three different\u00a0workshops to be held in Europe and the US.<\/p>\n Dr Bellido and Dr Kang have previously collaborated with project members in two workshops; one held at the Mundaneum<\/a> in Mons, Belgium, in 2015 and the other held at Link\u00f6ping University, Sweden, in 2016.\u00a0They are also Co-Pathway Directors of the Kent LLM Intellectual Property Law \u00a0Pathway<\/a> (a one-year Master\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n