Dr Smita Kheria

Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law

Co-Director of the Scottish Research Centre for Intellectual Property and Technology Law (SCRIPT)

LLB (Hons), LLM, PhD

Office hours:

Friday 16:15-17:15

Tel: +44 (0)131 650 2055

Email: smita.kheria@ed.ac.uk

View my publications

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.

She combines legal expertise in copyright and related rights with socio-legal research on intellectual property law in the ‘real world’. She has been involved in several RCUK funded research projects that have 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 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 leading a UKRI funded project on Streaming Services in the Music Industry.

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), and to engage the general public on the role and value of copyright (e.g. Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas 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 intellectual property courses in the Law School. She also contributes to cross-disciplinary teaching on the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s MSc in Creative Industries. She is a co-author of the textbook Contemporary Intellectual Property: Law and Policy  (3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th eds, Oxford University Press).

Smita has undertaken various leadership roles within and outwith the Law School. She has acted as the Director of Knowledge Exchange and Impact, Chair of Recruitment Strategy Taskforce, and Co-convenor of the Empirical Legal Research Network. She is a Director (IP Law) of the SCRIPT Centre. She is the Vice Chair of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, and also serves on its board of trustees as the International Liaison officer and the Scottish representative. She acts as Supervising editor (IP) for SCRIPTed: A journal of Law, Technology & Society and is a member of the editorial advisory board of The IP Law Book Review. She has recently co-founded the Network for Empirical Legal Studies in Intellectual Property.

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.

Twitter: @creatorsncopyrt