Music and the Law

Music and the Law

Join us for a conversation around challenges of compensating musicians, composers and songwriters in the digital age. Dr. Smita Kheria, Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law (University of Edinburgh) will open with remarks, followed by responses from Allen Ferrell, Greenfield Professor of Law (Harvard Law School), and Kenneth Kaufman (Board President, Lowell House Opera).  The session ends with an open Q&A. 

About the Speakers:

Dr. Smita Kheria

Smita is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law in Edinburgh Law School. She studied at the University of Buckingham (LLB (Hons)), the University of Cambridge (LLM), and at Queen's University Belfast (PhD). Before undertaking her doctoral studies, she also practised as an advocate in commercial and intellectual property law. Her primary areas of teaching and research expertise are in copyright and related rights, creative practices and new technologies, and socio-legal research in intellectual property law. 

Smita’s socio-legal research evaluates the complexities of copyright in a ‘real world’ context, with a particular focus on the law’s role in an uncertain fast-moving social, technological, and economic landscape. Through several UKRI funded research projects, she has empirically examined how copyright intersects with the everyday lives and practices of online creative communities, arts and humanities researchers, and professional creators and performers, as well as how creators’ organisations shape copyright policy. Her most recent project focused on streaming services in the music industry. Her publications provide a strong representation of artists’ understandings, voices, and concerns, about copyright, as a community separate from other stakeholders, and underline how insights from the lived everyday experiences of copyright challenge existing economic and legal assumptions about both what creative practitioners want and the meanings they associate with legal protections. She is currently working on a monograph, entitled ‘Close Encounters of the Copyright Kind: Locating the law in the everyday lives of creative practitioners’, and on a co-edited collection entitled ‘Legal Geographies of Intellectual Property’.

As part of her commitment to knowledge-exchange, Smita has shared her research extensively with non-academic audiences. Smita has drawn on empirical insights from her projects to contribute to policy discussions (e.g. UK music streaming inquiry; CMO regulation in Kenya), to inform the practice of creative industry organisations and practitioners (e.g. Edinburgh Fringe Central, Society of Young Publishers, Scottish Book Trust, Glasgow Comic Con, Glasgow Zine Library, Talbot Rice Gallery), and to engage the general public on the role and value of copyright (e.g. spoken-word shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Stand Comedy Club).

Smita is the founding and acting Programme Director for the on-campus LLM in Intellectual Property Law and teaches on a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the Law School. She is a co-author of the textbook Contemporary Intellectual Property: Law and Policy (3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th eds, Oxford University Press). Along with teaching substantive law, her teaching has championed the integration of socio-legal and empirical research in the intellectual property law curriculum. She also contributes to cross-disciplinary teaching on the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s MSc in Creative Industries.

Smita is the Chair of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, and has previously served on its board of trustees as the Vice Chair and the International Liaison officer. She is a Co-Director (IP Law) of the SCRIPT Centre. She co-convenes the 'Intellectual Property' stream at the SLSA Annual Conference, and serves as Supervising editor (IP) for SCRIPTed: A journal of Law, Technology & Society. She has recently co-founded the Network for Empirical Legal Studies in Intellectual Property. She has previously served as the Director of Knowledge Exchange and Impact, Chair of Recruitment Strategy Taskforce, and Co-convenor of the Empirical Legal Research Network, in Edinburgh Law School. Beyond academia, she serves as a board member of Edinburgh Printmakers.

Allen Ferrell

Allen Ferrell is the Greenfield Professor of Securities Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty associate at the Kennedy School of Government, chairman of the Harvard Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, and a research associate at the European Corporate Governance Institute. He was previously on the Board of Economic Advisors to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a research fellow at FINRA, and a member of the ABA Task Force on Corporate Governance. He has written widely on capital market regulation, securities litigation and corporate governance.  His representative publications include “Thirty years of shareholder rights and firm valuation” forthcoming in the Journal of Finance (with Martijn Cremers), “Forward-casting 10b-5 Damages: A Comparison to other Methods,” 37 Journal of Corporation Law 365 (with Atanu Saha) and “Mandated Disclosure and Stock Returns: Evidence from the Over-the-Counter Market,” 36 Journal of Legal Studies 1. He received his Ph.D in economics from MIT, his J.D. from Harvard Law School and his BA and MA from Brown University. He clerked for Judge Silberman on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Kenneth Kaufman

Since graduating from Harvard College (Lowell House) and Yale Law School, I have been a lawyer, senior executive and educator in the entertainment industry. I have served as senior vice president of Showtime Networks and PolyGram Records; as general counsel of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; as a partner at major law firms, where I represented clients ranging from Apple Inc. to Ziggy Marley; as a U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee counsel; and as a Visiting Lecturer at Yale, where I taught a course on “Music and the Law.” As an undergraduate, I spearheaded the initiative that led to a coeducational House system, gender-neutral admissions, and other measures to ensure equal educational opportunities for female students. I am also a composer whose works have been performed in Lowell House and Sanders Theatre. I would welcome opportunities to discuss law, music, the arts, career planning, gender equality, politics, or other subjects of interest.