Looking Forward to Another Exciting Year at IP Osgoode

Looking Forward to Another Exciting Year at IP Osgoode

Giuseppina D'Agostino is the Founder and Director of IP Osgoode and an Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Welcome back to another vibrant academic year at IP Osgoode!  Since the launch of Osgoode's Intellectual Property Law and Technology Program last October, we have inspired a fantastic range of diverse contributions in our blog, IPilogue, public events and other activities. We are fortunate to have many people coming together as part of this initiative and are grateful to draw from a growing community of Advisory Board Members, Research Affiliates, and International Advisory Council Members.

Our second year promises to be even better! 

We are pleased to welcome back on board Professor David Vaver, who joins us from the University of Oxford where he was Chair of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre.  He will be launching two new seminars this Fall: Legal Values: Intellectual Property & Health Care and Legal Values: Reforming Intellectual Property.  Indeed, our course offerings in intellectual property and technology law continue to expand.

We have experienced a significant increase in graduate student applications in the concentration of IP.  The number of visitors to our website and our weekly newsletter (The IPIGRAM) readership continues to grow and spans the globe.

It was also a busy summer for our students.  You can read about many of their internship experiences here.  Our team of IPilogue Editors continued to blog throughout the summer and constitutes an important part of our team and our vision of providing a diverse palette of views on intellectual property.  Significantly, we already have a number of students from other law schools working with us and we hope that more students will become involved.

Canada's IP Writing Challenge, established this year in conjunction with the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada, received a wide range of entries from a broad spectrum of backgrounds and institutions across Canada.  Students from over 9 different law schools participated.  Stay tuned, as we will be announcing the Challenge winners in late October, among various other initiatives.

We have another dizzying year packed with events and we hope to see many of you there.  For instance, in just a few weeks, we will be hosting a conference, "The Intellectual Property Bargain: Consumer Perspectives in a Global Economy" spearheaded by one of our very own PhD students, Pascale Chapdelaine, chaired by Professor Vaver and welcoming an A-list of speakers and participants including Dr. Dev Gangjee (London School of Economics), Professor Ariel Katz (University of Toronto), Professor Geertrui Van Overwalle (K.U. Leuven, Belgium), Professor Robert Kozinets (Schulich School of Business), and Drew Olsen (Director, Legislation and Negotiations, Copyright Policy, Canadian Heritage).

As part of our IP Osgoode Speaks lecture series, we are also pleased to announce the upcoming visits of Justice Marshall Rothstein, Supreme Court of Canada and Professor Graeme Dinwoodie, Chair in Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law at Oxford. Everyone is always welcome to attend all of our events and further details are available on our site.

A community is only as vibrant as its contributors. We have in front of us one of the most complex and challenging debates in intellectual property.  Please join us, we need your point of view.

Enjoy and hope to see you soon!