Research

Haochen Sun

Technology and the Public Interest

In this groundbreaking work, Haochen Sun analyzes the ethical crisis unfolding at the intersection of technology and the public interest. He examines technology companies’ growing power and their increasing disregard for the public good. To tackle this asymmetry of power and responsibility, he argues that we must reexamine the nature and scope of the right to technology and dynamically protect it as…

April 23, 2022

Anne Cheung

AI 江湖多聲音

A piece of writing by Anne Cheung published on Ming Pao in July 2023.

July 13, 2023

Taorui Guan

Contractual Bundles for Innovation

The question of how contracts promote innovation has long attracted scholars’ attention. This Article tackles this question by studying one contractual mechanism — bundling arrangements — that innovators frequently use to transfer other assets along with a patent license. It examines 400 patent licensing transactions that public companies filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and finds that 42.25% of them included…

February 6, 2023

Peter Watts and Kelvin Low

The Case for Cryptoassets as Property

Cryptoassets, introduced in the wake of the Great Recession (2007-2009), have proven to be very divisive. Embraced by some as part of a revolutionary future, they are derided by others as the misconceived fever dream of naïve technologists who don’t understand how the real world works. Despite a recent meltdown in the cryptoasset markets, or perhaps because of it, the courts will…

April 1, 2024

Haochen Sun

Redesigning Copyright Protection in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

How to protect the creations of artificial intelligence (“AI”) systems through copyright law is one of the most significant and complex legal issues of our time. Debated by stakeholders around the world, the issue has so far evaded consensus. However, a series of administrative and judicial rulings has altered the landscape. In 2019, a Chinese district court affirmed the copyrightability of a…

March 18, 2022

Anne Cheung

刷臉新世代

A piece of writing by Anne Cheung published in Ming Pao in September 2023.

September 7, 2023

Taorui Guan

Investors’ Perspective on Intellectual Property Financing

The intellectual property system is generally considered to be a legal system that promotes innovation. But the ways through which it achieves this goal are still not entirely clear. Conventional intellectual property theories tend to describe the system’s role in promoting innovation as providing creators with incentives to create and commercialize intellectual products, as well as disseminating knowledge to potential users. What…

November 28, 2023

Kelvin Low, Edmund Schuster, and Wai Yee Wan

The Company and Blockchain Technology

Blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) have generated much excitement over the past decade, with proclamations that they would disrupt everything from elections to finance. Unsurprisingly, the much-maligned corporate form is also considered ripe for disruption. While certainly imperfect, and currently serviced by creaking legal infrastructure premised upon direct shareholdings, are its problems ones of centralization/intermediation? What exactly are the limits of…

August 11, 2023