Professor Barton Beebe delivers inaugural Distinguished Visitor in IP Lecture

The inaugural Distinguished Visitor in Intellectual Property Lecture was delivered by Professor Barton Beebe on 20 March 2019, titled “Intellectual Property and Post-Scarcity Society”.
This Lecture series is organised by the EW Barker Centre for Law & Business (EWBCLB) to bring in eminent thought leaders in the field of intellectual property from around the world, and the lecture will be published in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies.

According to Professor Beebe, rapid technological progress has shifted discussion of the possibility of “post-scarcity society” from science fiction novels and utopian manifestoes to the pages of our newspapers and now to our law review articles. Commentators imagine a world in which three-dimensional printing, advanced robotics, synthetic biology, and artificial intelligence will enable the low-cost at-home manufacture of nearly all commodities and provision of nearly all services. Speaking to almost 200 members of the audience, his lecture considered the implications of post-scarcity society for law and specifically for intellectual property law.

Chairperson of the Lecture, Professor David Tan (Vice Dean (Academic Affairs), NUS Law & Director (Intellectual Property), EWBCLB) kept a lively Q&A session going, eliciting a discussion that ranged from artificial scarcity for high fashion brands to the proliferation of 3D printing.

About the Speaker

Barton Beebe is the John M. Desmarais Professor of Intellectual Property Law at New York University (NYU) School of Law, and a co-director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU. Professor Beebe received his JD from Yale Law School, his PhD in English Literature from Princeton University, and his BA from the University of Chicago. He has been the Anne Urowsky Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford.

As a legal scholar, he specialises in the doctrinal, empirical, and cultural analysis of intellectual property law, and has published prolifically in a wide range of top American law journals that include Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review and California Law Review.

Please click here to watch the video presentation.