1. British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship
Grant period: September 2024 – August 2025.
Project: The Role of the State in Intellectual Property Law in Times of Industrial Policy
During the Covid-19 pandemic, scholars disagreed about the adverse effects of intellectual property (IP) monopoly rights on access to vaccines, but most accepted the role of the state in fostering innovation, through funding research and awarding patents. The role of the state in IP law, however, remains undertheorised in current scholarship. Drawing upon my policy work during the Covid-19 pandemic and interdisciplinary scholarship, this fellowship will enable me to examine and outline the role of the state in IP law. The project will analyse the effects of the post-pandemic shift towards state-led industrial policy on existing justificatory frameworks of IP law that purport to balance private and public interests. It aims to advance more just meanings of innovation and public interest in IP law. The findings of the research will be disseminated to policymakers and academics and furnish them with a contemporary theory of IP law and its public function.
2. AHRC (UK Arts and Humanities Research Council) funded research network on ‘Legal Materialities‘, together with Dr Sara Kendall. Grant period: 2017-2019.
The Legal Materialities network will be an interdisciplinary forum for exchange that foregrounds the material dimensions of law in light of the transformations affecting many aspects of law, challenging its concepts and practices, such as property or territory. The legal materiality network will reconceptualise law as an assemblage of materials, norms, discourses and knowledge practices. It will formulate new approaches to make sense of law’s changing materiality, from textuality to diverse matters and media.
Precursor to the project were these exploratory events: https://lawtextmaterial.wordpress.com/
3. Patents: Legal Text as Scientific Text
Co-Principal investigator for Kent Law School acting as a partner university to European Research Council Advanced Grant on ‘Patents as Scientific Information 1895-2020’ (PASSIM). Lead and principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant: Professor Eva Hemmungs-Wirten, Linkoeping University.
Co-Investigator at KLS: Dr Jose Bellido.
Other project partners: Nobel Museum and Boras University.
Grant period: 2017-2022.
Project: What Do Patents Document? Reading and Using Scientific Information in Legal Text.
Dr Kang’s project will assess whether patent documents are regarded and used as scientific information by scientists themselves. The validity of the patent bargain is explored from the point of view of the intended users in order to ascertain scientists’ attitudes toward patents and whether they read and use patent information. Understanding patents as scientific information exposes an interstice between two different perceptions and function of patents: as public information and as legal documentation. The first approach towards patents assumes that the patent text is a documentary source, implying that the information contained in it has some kind of value beyond the legal text. The second approach regards the patent document as a legal registration document creating an intellectual property right. In this view, the invention is embodied by the patent document rather than being represented by it. A patent document may not have any scientific informational value. The tension between these two conceptions, one more sociological and the other more legal textual, will be explored in order to assess the ways and degrees in which a patent text indeed serves as scientific information for scientists today.
4. Patent Value/Valuation
Related Conference: Evaluations: Cases, Experiments and Models as tools of appropriations and valuation, June 2014, University of Lucerne.
Sponsored by Swiss National Science Foundation, University of Lucerne and Birkbeck School of Law.
Co-organised with Jose Bellido. [http://www.contentupdate.net/uniluadmin/web/unilu/files/Flyer_Abstract.pdf]
Hyo Yoon Kang 