Developing the Curriculum for Collaborative Intellectual Property Education

Intellectual property education, i.e. how intellectual property should be taught or more importantly how intellectual property is learnt, is a recent addition to the academic 'intellectual property' agenda. The regulation, acquisition and management of intellectual property rights presents economic, ethical, social and policy challenges across the international academic and business communities. Intellectual property is also the starting point of interesting academic cross-disciplinary collaborations in learning and teaching and in research. It will probably always be primarily a law subject taught by lawyers to law students hoping to practice. At the same time there is a growing array of disciplines demanding an awareness of and a competence in handling intellectual property concepts and regulations. At Bournemouth, we have been teaching IP across the disciplines for more than a decade. Recently, the Higher Education Academy subject centres in Law and in Engineering jointly funded a project to research 'IP for Engineers'. WIPO has begun addressing IP Education in earnest. At an international symposium in July 2005, papers addressed different aspects of IP Education, including Collaboration between Law Faculties and other disciplines. In November 2005, they jointly sponsored a National Conference in China to consider IP Education from primary school thru postgraduate research. IP education beyond the law school raises interesting questions for anyone contemplating teaching this complex law subject to non-lawyers. What constitutes the IP syllabus? Who should be teaching IP? When should it be taught? How should it be taught? What resources should be available? This paper begins to explore some of the answers.