Copyright Fair Use and the Digital Carnivalesque

Professor David Tan, Head of the Intellectual Property research cluster at the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business (EWBCLB), will be kicking off a new seminar series on 23 April 2021.

Following the publication of the Singapore Academy of Law Journal Special Issue on Law and Technology, the Centre for Technology, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & the Law (TRAIL) will be launching the Seminars on Law and Technology (SLATE), with the support of the Singapore Academy of Law. Based on the Special Issue, SLATE is a series of seminars exploring themes in the current debates surrounding the interactions between law and technology, and will be of interest to academics, practitioners, and entrepreneurs who desire a more nuanced exploration of the legal issues involved in new technologies. SLATE seminars will be held in a hybrid format with limited in-person attendance allowed.

SLATE I is based on Professor David Tan’s article, Copyright Fair Use and the Digital Carnivalesque: Towards a New Lexicon of Transformative Internet Memes, that is co-published with Mr Angus Wilson (Adjunct Research Fellow at EWBCLB). This session discusses new social norms of online behaviour in a social media environment, as a context for various creative practices, such as internet memes, that present a resistance to authority and established norms. Against this backdrop of memes presenting a host of challenges to exceptions and limitations in copyright law, SLATE I analyses how, and to what extent, memes should be protected by the fair use doctrine. Dr Stanley Lai (Chairman of IPOS) and Professor Martin Senftleben (University of Amsterdam) will be the commentators at this session moderated by Associate Professor Daniel Seng (Director of TRAIL).

Interested participants may register here – https://law.nus.edu.sg/trail/events/slate-session-1/

The article is available for download here – https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1777&context=iplj