The IIPSJ MOSAIC IP Law and Policy Roundtable Conference
Purpose and Objectives
The IIPSJ Mosaic Roundtable Conference was established to bring together scholars, law and policy makers, and social activists of diverse and multicultural backgrounds and perspectives to explore progressive and non-traditional ideas in intellectual property law, policy, and social activism. Beginning in the late twentieth century, digital information technology and other innovations sparked a paradigm shift in scholarly assessment of the social ordering function of IP protection, exposing the need to critically examine the law’s social justice obligations in promoting human rights, self-determination, cultural progress, and nation-building and evolution. Because IP law and policy makers traditionally value scholarly analyses in their development and interpretation of IP protection, this emerging body of progressive, social justice-oriented IP scholarship, especially when infused with the experience and insights of social activists and policy makers, can provide them with the doctrinal basis for shaping a more socially responsible IP legal regime.
The Mosaic Roundtable Conference Format
Each Roundtable Conference is organized around a specific IP social justice legal issue, policy, or socio-economic problem, and is comprised of four paper or project presentation sessions; each session is divided into a principal presentation, a commentator’s assessment, and open discussion. Representative Roundtable topics include equitable access to health, medicines, knowledge, and information; socially beneficial application of information technology and related advances to IP development and dissemination; legal protection for traditional and indigenous knowledge and expression; and promoting IP awareness, education, and entrepreneurial and socio-political empowerment in marginalized communities. The Roundtable Conference is also amenable to expansion into a two day format, to accommodate plenary panels, keynote presentations, and “incubator project” and work in progress sessions.
IP protection is intended to play an important role in engendering human development, socio-economic empowerment, and social justice. The traditional tools and experience of scholarly analysis, reflection, and discourse, however, are not always readily adaptive toward targeted social action, or what is sometimes referred to as “public intellectualism”. Through the IIPSJ Mosaic Roundtable Conference, IP scholars can work together with political activists, practicing attorneys, community organizers, and policy makers to produce “activist scholarship”, to collaborate on various “IP Empowerment” policy initiatives and projects, and to otherwise help to shape and effectuate a progressive and contemporary IP socio-legal agenda.
2014:The First Annual IP Mosaic Conference: Diverse Voices in IP Scholarship
Luncheon Keynote: Reconstructing the IP Scholar Activist