Wanted, More Than Human Intellectual Property: Animal Authors and Human Machines (Routledge, 2025)

Author:

Professor Johanna Gibson, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Queen Mary, University of London

Introduction and Chair:

Lord Justice Arnold (Court of Appeal of England and Wales)

Commentators:

Dr Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa – Senior Lecturer in Law, IHSS Fellow, and Founding Co-Director of the Forum on Decentering the Human, QMUL

Inga Hamilton – Artist and researcher (interspecies communication and the making of art)

About the Book

In Wanted, Johanna Gibson analyses animal creativity in order to unsettle the dominant assumptions that underpin current ideas of authorship and ownership in intellectual property. Wanted builds upon Gibson’s theory and methodology of ethological jurisprudence, first introduced in Owned, An Ethological Jurisprudence of Property (2020), drawing upon theories of animal behaviour and cognitive ethology. In Wanted, an ethological jurisprudence of authorship reveals and disrupts the anthropocentrism that informs prevailing assumptions about creativity, intentionality, and authorship within the field of intellectual property, towards a new theory of authorship and personhood through play and the playful. Moving on to challenge the invocation of a more general human-nonhuman distinction in this context, the book also engages with the challenge posed by artificial intelligence, and the limitations of “human” machines. Incorporating critical animal studies, behavioural science, ethology, critical legal studies, and legal philosophy, the book presents a new idea of creativity, which undermines the kind of rivalrous models now common in the field of intellectual property.

About the Author

Johanna Gibson is Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Director of the LLM, and Programme Director of the Fashion Law LLM. She is also Editor-In-Chief of the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property (QMJIP). Johanna has published extensively in the fields of intellectual property, critical theory, and animal studies, with a particular focus on the interaction between cultural work, authorship, and cognitive ethology. Before joining CCLS, Johanna practised law at a top tier firm in Melbourne, Australia, in Intellectual Property as well as Media and Communications Law and Competition Law.