Book Launch: Wanted, More Than Human Intellectual Property
When: Thursday, May 1, 2025, 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: Lecture Theatre, Centre For Commercial Law Studies, QMUL, 67-69 Lincoln's Inn Fields London WC2A and Online
Professor Johanna Gibson's book 'Wanted, More Than Human Intellectual Property: Animal Authors and Human Machines' launch, organised by the Centre for Commercial Law Studies in collaboration with the Forum on Decentering the Human
About the Book
In Wanted, Johanna Gibson analyses animal creativity in order to unsettle the dominant assumptions that underpin current ideas of authorship and ownership in intellectual property. Wanted builds upon Gibson’s theory and methodology of ethological jurisprudence, first introduced in Owned, An Ethological Jurisprudence of Property (2020), drawing upon theories of animal behaviour and cognitive ethology. In Wanted, an ethological jurisprudence of authorship reveals 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 with the challenge posed by artificial intelligence, and the limitations of “human” machines. 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.
About the Author
Johanna Gibson is Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Director of the LLM, and Programme Director of the Fashion Law LLM. She is also Editor-In-Chief of the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property (QMJIP)
The Panellists
Dr Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa – Senior Lecturer in Law, IHSS Fellow, and Founding Co-Director of the Forum on Decentering the Human, QMUL
Inga Hamilton – Artist and researcher (interspecies communication and the making of art)
All are welcome but please register on Eventbrite by clicking on "Book now".
The event is organised by organised by the Centre for Commercial Law Studies in collaboration with HSS Research Centre Forum on Decentering the Human and supported by the IHSS.