[LUM#14] The Right to Think

[LUM Magazine] - Published on July 20, 2021 in Valuation

What do the latest Goncourt Prize, the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, and the video game Fortnite? All three are “products of the human mind and therefore therefore potentially fall under intellectual property law,” explains Agnès Robin*, a lecturer and researcher in and a specialist in the field.

“My family introduced me to issues related to artistic creation, as well as technology and computer science, at a very early age.” This was likely what prompted the young Agnès Robin, then a law student at Nanterre, to pursue what was, in the mid-1990s, merely an elective course: intellectual property law. “The code governing it in 1992 was four times thinner than the one from 2020,” recalls with a smile the woman who now heads the highly regarded master’s program in intellectual property and digital law.

Aesthetic and technical designs

While intellectual property rights emerged in the late 18th century with the advent of industrial capitalism
, it was in the second half of the 20th century that they truly expanded. The boom in the cultural and creative industries, followed of course by the rise of digital technology, cemented the indispensable role of these rights. “All these industries operate on and through the exploitation of intellectual property rights,” emphasizes Agnès Robin. “These rights play an active role in corporate strategy, whether in the cultural or technological sphere, because they are tools for monetizing intellectual assets.”

“This applies not only to corporate strategy but also to that of public research institutions,” notes Agnès Robin, recalling her time as a doctoral student when she worked as a temporary staff member in the CNRS’s Commercialization and Partnerships Department , “which was a pioneer in this area. “I was drafting contracts with industry partners and thus negotiating joint ownership of the results of public research. That’s when I realized this was an area that hadn’t been explored much yet.” Intellectual co-ownership would become the subject of her dissertation and the main focus of her research.

The Challenge of Open Science

The numerous reforms set to impact higher education and research—particularly those concerning university autonomy—place intellectual property law, more than ever, at the heart of their development. “Universities conduct a great deal of applied research—and thus oftendevelop patentable
—through partnerships with industry, ” explains the researcher. “It’s a way to encourage companies to invest in public research.” It also serves as a powerful lever for public research institutions to capitalize on their teams’ findings.

In the age of open data, intellectual property law experts now face a new challenge: open science. This policy encourages the open-access dissemination of research data, thereby raising questions about the legal status of such data. The researcher has been working on this topic for four years as part of the interdisciplinary CommonData project. “This issue requires coordinating numerous frameworks that are not always consistent with one another: the Intellectual Property Code, the Research Code, and the Code of Relations between the Public and the Administration, which governs the opening of public data…” When intellectual property presents quite a headache.

*UMR Law Dynamics (UM – CNRS)

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