Dr Smita Kheria
Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law
Co-Director of the Scottish Research Centre for Intellectual Property and Technology Law (SCRIPT); Programme Director LLM in Intellectual Property Law
LLB (Hons), LLM, PhD
Email: smita.kheria@ed.ac.uk
View my publicationsSmita 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.
Smita welcomes applications for doctoral study and post-doctoral mentoring. She is particularly interested in proposals for postgraduate research in the area of copyright and related rights, and also projects that use empirical methodologies to study issues in Intellectual Property Law.
She currently supervises:
