Draft seminars list 26/27

Calls for innovation in women’s, female and trans health are urgent and overdue, but sex/gender-targeted health technologies can also be co-opted into the ordinary logics of patent law, regulatory review and health-technology markets. This seminar introduces the concepts of pink patenting and ever-pinking to examine how appeals to unmet need and sex/gender specificity may support product differentiation, patent portfolio expansion, market segmentation and premium pricing, without proportionate benefit to the target community. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies, political economy, and patent, regulatory and judicial examples from the European Union, the United States, and New Zealand, it argues that legal and regulatory regimes do not merely respond to innovation, but help construct what counts as an invention, what problems are recognised, what evidence is required, and when sex/gender differences are made salient or rendered silent. The seminar concludes by considering how greater transparency, comparability and evidentiary discipline could help ensure that sex/gender-targeted innovation delivers meaningful health improvements rather than simply new market categories.

In this talk I examine how the patent system operates as a system of ‘industrialised hope’, framed by the promise of beneficial innovation, but which can instead become a vehicle for extracting unfair profits and enabling public harm. The first strand draws on my forthcoming 2026 European Law Open article on ‘fair profits’ in the pharmaceutical industry. I argue that pharmaceutical prices and profits should be understood as constituted by law rather than generated by neutral market processes. The patent system is not a backdrop to market activity but one of the primary legal mechanisms through which that market, and its distortions, are constructed. I trace how this legal architecture ties financial reward to exclusivity-enabled pricing power rather than to any measure of therapeutic or social value, examining how existing correctives – compulsory licensing, public funding conditions, supplementary incentives – address symptoms of this problem without disturbing its root cause. The talk’s second strand draws on my 2025 SLS article – ‘False Hope and Fictitious Patents’ – to show this dynamic in its starkest form. Patenting practices around OxyContin relied on the rhetoric of industrialised hope but functioned not merely to create and extend market exclusivity, but to construct a misleading narrative of beneficial innovation, fuelling the devastating US opioid crisis. I conclude that the dark side of pharmaceutical innovation is not an aberration at the margins of an otherwise well-functioning system, but a structural feature of a legal architecture that privileges exclusivity-based profit extraction over patient welfare – and one that current IP law tools are ill-equipped to correct.

This talk presents Grey Lines, a tattoo and copying norms project by intellectual property scholar Marie Hadley and tattooist and design scholar Adam McDade. Exhibited at Watt Space Gallery in 2025 and Queen Mary University of London in 2026, Grey Lines offers a tattooist-centred, collaboration-driven account of contingent authorship in everyday practice, foregrounding the intersection of copying and creativity. It also reflects on the novel collaborative research process through which Hadley and McDade generated and captured practice-based and reflective data.

The talk explores the two Grey Lines installations and the research methods behind them, drawing on tattoo practice, embodied inquiry, and reflective approaches to support interdisciplinary work across different places and contexts. Through voice note excerpts, videos, and photographs, the authors show how they developed low-friction collaborative processes that flatten knowledge hierarchies and support authentic, meaningful interdisciplinary work. Members of the public are positioned as third-party collaborators within the project, with the exhibition, its participatory features, and everyday client interactions functioning as sites of knowledge production and co-creation. Authorship, collaboration, and the familiar intellectual property conundrum of using reference images to create new work are reframed through the tattooist’s lens of lived, embodied creative practice. The project highlights the necessity of creative methodologies and collaboration to generate meaningful insights that traditional academia is often ill-equipped to access.

The correlation between citizenship, patents and democracy is part of the scholarly discourse in many countries. This paper aims to look at the landscape of intellectual property law in colonial India and intertwines it with the awareness of women’s movement in property rights. While the women’s movement in colonial India was marked by a visibility in the public sphere, with challenges to colonial and religious orthodoxy, there were very few women applicants for patents during this period. The paper bridges the parallel but interconnected trajectories of women’s rights to property, and evident patent consciousness in colonial India. 

The historical trajectory of the law was as follows: the first statutory law to protect inventions was introduced by the Act VI of 1856, in colonial India. Unsurprisingly, not a single Indian patentee filed a patent application. Revised in 1911, there were several impediments to Indians filing for patents: the English language, education and the underpinning ideas of patentability.  While the transfer of technology is often the focus of studies on patent cultures, this paper is a social history of patenting law in colonial India. It resonates with Swanson’s (2022) argument on race and gender in American history, that being inventive was intricately tied into the hierarchy of race and gender. Building on our existing work that Indian patentees in the late colonial period (1911-48) were predominantly men who benefited from an access to bureaucratic positions and technical education in the 1930s (Mirza: 2023), we now turn our attention to women. By braiding the gendered silences and gaps in the archives, this paper intertwines archival material, with women’s corresponding visibility in shaping democratic rights. 

Further details to be provided in due course.

The presentation is based on a forthcoming monograph of the same title. It explores how UK copyright law has shaped a ‘cultural hierarchy’ of music, ascribing (Western) Classical music to ‘high culture’ and (Scottish) traditional music to ‘low culture’. Taking a socio-legal, critical, and interdisciplinary (i.e., law and music/cultural studies) approach, the research examines the following questions: (1) it reveals UK copyright law’s hierarchical protection accorded to different music manifestations and dissects it into the notions of originality, authorship, and fixation; (2) it examines how these notions changed the respective production paradigms (i.e., creation process, creatorship, creation form) of classical music and traditional music during 1770s-1840s; and (3) it analyses how these changes endowed each music genre with new aesthetic characteristics and thus ascribed it to either ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture under the modern system of fine arts. The analysis of the three interwoven questions constructs a model of how copyright law shapes the perception of music.

It stands as the first book-length, focused research to debunk the cultural hierarchy of music through a copyright lens. It therefore provides innovative insights into copyright law’s impacts on cultural production and perception. The presentation will be of great interest to intellectual property scholars, legal historians, (ethno)musicologists, and other researchers interested in the intersection between law and music.