Rosemary J. Coombe is a Tier One Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Cultural Studies at York University in Toronto, where she teaches in the Communications and Culture Joint PhD/MA Programme, and is cross-appointed to the Osgoode Hall Faculty of Law Graduate Programme, and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. Prior to being awarded one of the country's first Canada Research Chairs she was Full Professor of Law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She holds a J.S.D. from Stanford University with a Minor in Anthropology and publishes widely in anthropology and political and legal theory.

Her work addresses the cultural, political, and social implications of intellectual property laws. Her book, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties is a legal ethnography of the ways in which intellectual property law shapes cultural politics in consumer societies.

Recently, she has been working on two projects. With Andrew Herman she is engaged in a study of the ethics of property and propriety involved in the management of trademarks on the world-wide web and the ways in which digital environments enable consumers to interrupt and to contest the corporate assumption of goodwill. These issues were covered in a recent address at MIT - webcast available here.

A larger project concerns the protection of biological diversity, its relation to cultural diversity and the international movement to protect traditional knowledge in the international human rights framework. How and why have cultural claims been revitalized in the information economy, and to what extent can appeals for the protection of cultural traditions serve progressive ends?

In recent remarks, she suggests that political movements to protect the public domain need to become more cross cultural and more dialogic in nature and that authorship remains an aspirational status that will continue to attract the political energies of the world's marginalized in a globalizing economy. Video available here. (Real Player required)

Infrastructure:

Artmob is a multisectoral initiative designed to build large, accessible online archives of publically licensed Canadian art, and to foreground the issues that this process raises for Canadian copyright and intellectual property laws. It is part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers in close consultation with artists, cultural producers and cultural industry groups.

For more information click here

 

 

Rosemary Coombe can be contacted by email: rcoombe@yorku.ca