Professor Jane Ginsburg delivers 20th Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Lecture

On 31 January 2023, Professor Jane Ginsburg delivered the 20th Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Lecture at the Bukit Timah Campus of NUS Law.

The proliferation of literary, artistic, and musical outputs assisted by artificial intelligence has roiled copyright law, straining both the front-end concept of authorship and the back-end of copyright defences, particularly fair use. In the lecture, titled “Fair Use in the US Redux: Reformed or Still Deformed?”, Professor Ginsburg discussed the fair use status of machine learning inputs: whether the massive ingestion of copyrighted works as “training data” does or should qualify as fair use. The lecture covered an analysis of key US fair use decisions such as Google v. Oracle; Authors Guild v. Google; Cariou v. Prince; Dr Seuss Enterprises v. ComicMix; and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith. A lively discussion followed, moderated by Professor David Tan.

NUS Law established the “Kwa Geok Choo Distinguished Visitors Programme” in 2012 as one of the several initiatives to pay tribute to the late Madam Kwa Geok Choo, wife of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Under this programme, leading law academics are invited to teach an intensive course at NUS for three weeks and to deliver a public lecture on a topical legal issue. Past visitors included Gary Born, Christine Chinkin, Matthew Harding, Ran Hirschl, Michael Klausner, Peter Mirfield, Donal Nolan, Francis Reynolds, Cheryl Saunders and Mark Tushnet. The lecture will also be published in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies in the second-half of 2023.

About Jane Ginsburg

Jane Ginsburg is the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at Columbia University School of Law, and Faculty Co-Director of its Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts.

A graduate of the University of Chicago, Professor Ginsburg received a JD in 1980 from Harvard, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a Diplôme and a Doctorate of Law from the Paris-Panthéon-Assas University. Amongst her many appointments, she is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, an elected Member of the American Philosophical Society, and a Member of the American Academy of Arts.

Professor Ginsburg is one of the most well-known and respected intellectual property scholars globally, and is the author of numerous casebooks, articles and book chapters on US and international copyright and trademark law. She describes herself as a “staunch defender of authors’ rights”. In 2022, Oxford University Press published the third edition of the treatise, co-authored with Sam Ricketson, International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Convention and Beyond.

Fluent in French and Italian, Professor Ginsburg has been a visiting professor at law schools and universities in France and Italy, as well as in Australia, England, Israel and New Zealand. At NUS Law, she will be teaching “US Copyright: International & Comparative Perspectives” from 30 January to 17 February 2023.

Professor Ginsburg was previously in Singapore in November 2019 where she delivered the second EW Barker Centre’s Distinguished Visitor in Intellectual Property Lecture titled “Fair Use in the United States: Transformed, Deformed, Reformed?”, which was published in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies.