Professor Jane Ginsburg delivers Distinguished Visitor in IP Lecture

The second Distinguished Visitor in Intellectual Property Lecture was delivered by Professor Jane Ginsburg (Columbia Law School) on 12 November 2019, titled “Fair Use in the United States: Transformed, Deformed, Reformed?”.

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.

It was a full house at the Moot Court, which hosted Justice Pang Khang Chau (Supreme Court of Singapore), Dr Stanley Lai SC (Chairman, Intellectual Property Office of Singapore) and Mr Simon Seow (Director (Intellectual Property Policy Division), Ministry of Law).

According to Professor Ginsburg, since the US Supreme Court’s 1994 adoption of “transformative use” as a criterion for evaluating the first statutory fair use factor (“nature and purpose of the use”), “transformative use” analysis has engulfed all of fair use, becoming transformed, and perhaps deformed, in the process. First deployed to assess whether the challenged use resulted in a work that transformed the copied material with “new meaning or message,” transformative use evolved into transformative purpose, enabling a variety of technological fair uses that copied entire works without accompanying commentary, criticism or other substantive intervention in the work’s content. Lately, however, the fair use pendulum’s outward swing may have arrested, as US Circuit Courts are expressing greater skepticism concerning what uses actually “transform” content copied into new works or repurposed into copyright-voracious systems. Professor Ginsburg also considered whether the US experience might offer useful guidance (or cautionary tales) to other jurisdictions, notably Singapore, which are considering adopting or expanding fair use-type copyright exceptions.

Professor David Tan (Vice Dean (Academic Affairs), NUS Law & Head (Intellectual Property), EWBCLB) moderated a humorous Q&A session that included a discussion of Star Wars self-parody products and reposting photos on Instagram.

The next Lecture will be presented by Professor Graeme Dinwoodie (IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law) on 21 October 2021, provisionally titled “Trademark Law as a Normative Project”.

About the Speaker

Jane C. Ginsburg is the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at Columbia University School of Law, and Faculty Director of its Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts. She teaches Legal Methods, Copyright Law, International Copyright Law, and Trademarks Law, and is the author or co-author of casebooks in all four subjects, as well as of many articles and book chapters on domestic and international copyright and trademark law. With Professor Edouard Treppoz, she is the co-author of International Copyright: US and EU Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 2015). With Professor Robert A. Gorman, she is the co-author of Copyright: Concepts and Insights (Foundation Press, 2012); with Professor Sam Ricketson, of International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Convention and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2006); and with Professor Rochelle Dreyfuss and Professor François Dessemontet, Ginsburg was a co-reporter for the American Law Institute project on “Intellectual Property: Principles Governing Jurisdiction,” Choice of Law and Judgments in Transnational Disputes (2008).

A graduate of the University of Chicago (BA 1976, MA 1977), Professor Ginsburg received a JD in 1980 from Harvard, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a Diplôme d’études approfondies (1985) and a Doctorate of Law (1995) from the University of Paris II. She is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

Please click here to watch the video presentation.