Ocean Voices visiting fellow Julia Schutz Veiga presented her ongoing research on the intersection of intellectual property and transfer of marine technology at the Workshop for PhD students – ATRIP Conference. By Julia Schutz Veiga The Doctoral Students Workshop and Best Presentation Contest of the ATRIP Conference was held at Luiss University in Rome, Italy, on 30 June, with the support of renowned institutions (Luiss School of Law, ATRIP, 4 IP Council and Google). This unique panel of the ATRIP Conference was dedicated to junior researchers who wanted to improve their doctoral research. The junior researchers had 5 minutes to make their pitch, which was followed by comments from an expert. This expert was chosen by the ATRIP scientific committee to evaluate the skills of PhD candidates – their oral presentation and extended abstract. The ATRIP Conference is one of the most prestigious international events on intellectual property and is a real milestone in Julia’s academic path. In general terms, Julia wants to understand how international IP law interacts with the tech transfer regime in the context of the law of the sea. Taking into account, her presentation centred on the first chapter of her thesis – what marine technology is and how this concept has evolved. Julia based her analysis on the concept of marine technology in the light of IP law and how it benefits the tech transfer regime. Julia has explored the concept of the ocean-climate nexus and its influence on technology transfer to achieve ocean equity between states. She emphasised that this equation – the need for specific marine technologies to solve the challenges of climate change – gives the BBNJ Agreement a prominent role in international law. By defining ‘marine technology’ and establishing a mechanism for benefit-sharing and operationalising the tech transfer framework, this international legal instrument has great potential to fill legal gaps, interact with the IP regime and promote more robust initiatives for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity. After Julia presented her preliminary results, scholar Susy Frankel (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) reacted to the presentation. The commentator emphasised the complexities of achieving ‘ocean equity’ among states due to the diversity of each country and its relationship with the ocean and how to address it in international legal instruments. Although Frankel had positive comments on the analyses of the legal definition of marine technology, she would have liked to see a better exploration of the purpose and objective of having a legal definition (according to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties). Finally, Frankel outlined misgivings about the legal definition not covering traditional knowledge and required more investigations on how this could be remedied by the mechanisms established by the BBNJ Agreement. Note: Julia has been supervised by Professors Giulia Priora (NOVA School of Law), Harriet Harden-Davies (University of Edinburgh), and Vito De Lucia (UiT). For this first chapter, Professors Priora and Harden-Davies were directly involved in supervising Julia’s analysis. Stay tuned to hear more from each of the Fellows by following Ocean Voices on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Join the conversation. Publication date 03 Sep, 2024
