The Institute for the Study of Law, Technology and Culture (ISLTC) will bring together scholars at the Faculty of Law who address the interface between technology and law with the wealth of scholars at the University who address the interface between technology and society. ISLTC will create a forum for exchange between legal scholars who approach technology law through economic, political, philosophical and cultural theories, and scholars from other disciplines who critically examine technology from the perspective of their disciplines. These latter scholars include faculty from the Departments of Philosophy, Political Science, History, English, Geography, Cinema Studies and Sociology, from the Faculty of Information Studies, the Rotman School of Management, as well as other interdisciplinary programs already established at the University, including the Humanities Centre, the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Centre for Comparative Literature, the Centre for International Studies, the Centre for Media and Culture in Education, the Knowledge Media Design Institute, Citizen Lab, NetLab, The McLuhan Program in Culture & Technology, New Media Studies at UTSC, and the Communication Culture and Information Technology program at UTM.
The legal scholars who will be affiliated with ISLTC are leaders in interdisciplinary work addressing central issues in the fields of intellectual property, privacy, and cyberlaw. The Faculty of Law represents the major cross-currents in intellectual property, information and technology studies, and is deeply engaged in cross-disciplinary dialogue. ISLTC will link these scholars, as well as the University’s impressive internal network of scholars working in these areas, with national and international scholars. By forging links with centres of a similar kind at other Law Faculties worldwide, the project will provide a focused forum for enquiry into the cultural and legal significance of technology that does not exist at any other institution in Canada.
Events 2008
The Institute for the Study of Law, Technology and Culture (ISLTC) at the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy is planning two interdisciplinary colloquia in May 2008 (dates tbc) which will be invitation only events to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue regarding a topic central to law and ripe for analysis by other disciplines. We have chosen topics which are key to law and also have strong cultural implications affecting, inter alia, the way that technology is used and understood.
Legal Conceptions of Reputation: The first colloquium will center on the concept of “reputation”. Variations of “reputation” operate in defamation law, privacy law, intellectual property law (such as the reputation of an author in copyright and that of a trader in trade-mark), competition law and criminal law (the relevance and admissibility of prior bad acts, for instance, also known as “similar fact evidence”). Generally speaking, protection of one’s reputation seems fundamental to any conception of human dignity.
Reputation is not only a topic worthy of investigation in its own right. It has also taken on heightened significance in the face of the Internet and other new communications media. Consider, for instance, the recent media attention given to the fact that a large number of registered sex offenders have Facebook pages, or the issue of whether damage to the reputation of an avatar in a digital community (such as Second Life) is actionable.
Knowledge, Culture and Human Rights: The second colloquium will examine the intersection of intellectual property and human rights. Major areas where this intersection has gained prominence are in access to medicines, ownership of DNA sequences, the protection of traditional knowledge and culture, issues of cultural patrimony for third world nations, and the relation between copyright and trade-mark, on the one hand, and freedom of expression and access to information, on the other.
One approach to examining the intersection of human rights and IP has been through international human rights instruments (treaties), and another is to consider the relationship of fundamental rights (typically expressed in national constitutions) to the encounter between owner and user rights. A portion of this event will be focused on the protection of aboriginal knowledge and culture, and on the relationship between that protection and freedom of expression concerns.
Events 2007