Our Seminars

 

 1. "Use / Usage"

Modern legal thought often considers an item of property to be a thing which bears some profit or advantage, considering it in terms of the thing’s economic value. The very fact of the thing’s potential to be turned to use, by being employed or transferred, would permit it to be the subject of ownership. Use, understood in this sense, would be the reason and end justifying property.

Conceived from the perspective of use, an item of property is influenced by the dichotomy between tangibles and intangibles. An immaterial thing is not turned to use in the same ways as a material one. Granted, this dichotomy carries its own baggage of legal distinctions (e.g., intangible things could hardly be consumable ones) and conceptual distinctions (e.g., the user of a work is not the possessor of a thing, this person is sometimes even a "pirate").

From Private Law to Intellectual Property, use (of a thing, of a right) would then dwell in a conceptual landscape fertile for metaphors, yet also auspicious to the identification of a few myths. After all, isn’t it from how we use things that we can best grasp our legal relationship to them?
 
Panelists:

- Wendy Ann Adams	Meaning and metaphor: Associative thinking and the unacknowledged images of "use" in intellectual property
- Éric Labbé	Entre user d'un droit et user d'une chose (French only)
- Pierre Emmanuel Moyse	Mode(s) d'emploi (French only)

Place and date:

New Chancellor Day Hall, Room 202, 3644 Peel Street Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 2:00 PM

 

2. "Domain / Domaine"

Evoking strong images and marked by history, domain is a polysemous concept shared by private law and the law of intellectual property.

The term domain comes from the Latin dominium. It expresses the idea of a person’s power, a person’s domination, and corresponds to owners’ exclusive control over their things, their right to use and enjoy the property that they own. In this light, domain and property are synonyms.

The idea or the imagery of a domination, taken up again in the Middle Ages, offers another meaning, narrower, but still in use: the public domain, designating the entirety of the property belonging to the Sovereign, property which is, due to this, imprescriptible, unseizable, and inalienable.

When deployed as a metaphor, the expression public domain also designates the creations of the human mind that are not subject to an intellectual monopoly, in particular because this right has expired or has been abandoned. Rather than embody the idea of an assemblage of state-owned property or of an appropriation, the expression encompasses instead the incorporeal things which can be freely used. They are not under appropriation, and quite often cannot be appropriated. In this light, public domain and property would be antonyms…

From exclusive control of things to free use of them, the concept of domain evokes a set of metaphors which allow us to better grasp our conception of classical property and our conception of intellectual property.

Those interested in attending this second seminar will be able to consult the texts prepared by our panellists and, if they wish, publish their own comments (with the images of their choice) on the M&M website.

Panelists :

- David Lametti	The Dynamics of Domain	(Your comments)
- Tina Piper	What is the domain of the ‘public domain’?	(Your comments)
- Pierre-Olivier Laporte	Entre domaine public et domaine privé :  les « limbes » de la propriété intellectuelle (French only)	(Your comments)

Place and Date:

New Chancellor Day Hall, room 202, 3644 Peel Street Wednesday, 16 September 2009, from 12:30 to 2 P.M.

Seminar Audio Recording

Publish Your Comments!

On the occasion of this second seminar, we offer interested persons the possibility of publishing a comment on our website as to the text of one of our panellists. Each comment must include a text with a maximum length of 600 words and, if possible, one or a few images meant to illustrate the principal ideas of the text. These comments can be transmitted to us, before or after the seminar, by email.

 

3. "Patrimony / Patrimoine"

Patrimony evokes at once a general sense of transmission and the idea of an assemblage, ever since the origins of the term in Latin, where patrimonium denoted the “property of the family, inherited from the father”.

The Civil Law first shared this idea of an assemblage. There the concept of the patrimony takes the shape of a universality, composed of items of property as well as of obligations, and is generally tied to a person.  This idea is also embodied through collective patrimonies -already know to the Romans under the metaphorical expression patrimonium populi, which meant public treasure- composed of property, of information, of features that are judged essential for society, the human race or its environment.

Whether the patrimony is personal or collective, it also conveys a sense of transmission. Among other things, it brings to mind the patrimony of the deceased and his succession, the circulation in the market of rights we dub “patrimonial” or, just as well, the inheritance constituted by cultural, genetic, and biological patrimonies.

If the patrimony is, on balance, an assemblage of transmissible things, its content nevertheless remains unclear and the categories which arise from it remain porous.
For example, what are we to make of the economic facets of extrapatrimonial rights? What are the rights in one’s image, if not a monopoly similar to intellectual assets? Thus, what could they be if not “intellectual property”? Moreover, shouldn’t we see all privileges which bear an economic cast as patrimonial rights?
And what of intellectual property rights with respect to traditional know-how? Are marketing and development appropriate legal mechanisms to address the subject-matter of the patrimony constituted by cultural heritage or, more generally, to address the field of creation?

From private law to intellectual property law, the concept of the patrimony leads to the use of legal categories whose bright-lines seem ever more clouded and grey, if not to say ever more mythical. Besides, will metaphors serve as pedagogical devices, thereby allowing us to better grasp the nature of these patrimonial fissures?

Those interested in attending this third seminar will be able to consult the texts prepared by our panellists and, if they wish, publish their own comments (with the images of their choice) on the M&M website.

Panelists :

- Lionel Smith	A Container, its Contents, and its Carrier
- France Allard	Les droits extrapatrimoniaux et le patrimoine : expression d’un rapport « mythique » entre l’avoir et l’être (French only)
- Valérie Laure Benabou	Patrimoine culturel (French only)

Place and Date:

New Chancellor Day Hall, room 316, 3644 Peel Street Thursday, 19 November 2009, from 12:30 to 2 P.M.

Publish Your Comments!

On the occasion of this third seminar, we offer interested persons the possibility of publishing a comment on our website as to the text of one of our panellists. Each comment must include a text with a maximum length of 600 words and, if possible, one or a few images meant to illustrate the principal ideas of the text. These comments can be transmitted to us, before or after the seminar, by email.