Wanted, More than Human Intellectual Property Animal Authors and Human Machines

Description

This book analyses animal creativity in order to unsettle the dominant assumptions that underpin current ideas of authorship and ownership in intellectual property.

Drawing upon theories of animal behaviour and cognitive ethology, the book exposes and disrupts the anthropocentrism that informs prevailing assumptions about creativity, intentionality, and authorship within the field of intellectual property, towards a new theory of authorship and personhood through play and the playful. Moving on to challenge the invocation of a more general human-nonhuman distinction in this context, the book also engages the challenge to this distinction posed by artificial intelligence. Incorporating critical animal studies, behavioural science, ethology, critical legal studies, and legal philosophy, the book presents a new idea of creativity, which undermines the kind of rivalrous models now common in the field of intellectual property.

Bio

Johanna Gibson is Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Director of the LLM, and Academic Director of the Fashion Law LLM. She is also Editor-In Chief of the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property (QMJIP). She has consulted widely to industry, government, NGOs and practitioners, and has been a visiting professor to institutions around the world, including the Queensland University of Technology (Australia), Monash University (Australia), the University of Toronto (Canada) and the Institute of Musical Research (School of Advanced Studies, UK). Johanna’s research interests are in intellectual property and the creative industries, particularly fashion and film, and animal 
welfare law and companion animal behaviour and science.