More than 200 participants attended the hybrid event: renowned scholars from seven countries, representatives of Brazilian ministries, and members of the Brazilian judiciary discussed current challenges at the intersection of innovation, competition, health, and artificial intelligence. Two members of the Institute were also involved: Pedro Henrique D. Batista, an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Institute, organized the event together with EMERJ – just a few days after he had played a key role in organizing the 44th Annual Congress of ATRIP in São Paulo. In addition to participating in the opening panel, he gave a presentation on “Sham Litigation in Patent Law.”
Reto M. Hilty, the Institute’s Director Emeritus, also spoke at the symposium. He discussed current developments in European copyright law in the digital age and participated in the subsequent academic discussions.
The program covered a broad range of topics: regulation and innovation capacity, public health and patent law, licenses and patents for secondary use, unfair competition, and trade dress. Additional topics included geographical indications of origin, technology transfer, legal technology, and copyright law and artificial intelligence. The event aimed to bring together comparative law perspectives on these regulatory challenges and to deepen academic exchange between countries and scholars.
The symposium was made possible by the Institute and FIZ Karlsuhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure – through their institutional support, as well as by the British government and LES Brasil as partners.
Digitalization, artificial intelligence, and sustainable innovation confront intellectual property law with the same questions worldwide – only the answers vary depending on the legal system. The symposium in Rio de Janeiro demonstrated how much academia, the judiciary, and policymakers can learn from this comparative analysis when they conduct it jointly.