Welcome to Intellectual Property Law et al.

Bạn có thể đọc phần giới thiệu bằng tiếng Việt về tôi tại đây.

A disclaimer: As I am still learning how to design my website to be more user-friendly, all of my English posts are here.

Something about me

Hi, I am Van Anh Le, an Assistant Professor in IP law working at University of Durham (link)

Born and raised in Vietnam, I have spent the past eight years studying and working in the UK. After completing LLB in Vietnam, I moved to the UK to study for LLM and PhD degrees at Bangor, a small but beautiful university in Wales. While my LLM dissertation looked into the anti-dumping practice in Vietnam, I decided to direct my PhD research to the IP area (see my PhD abstract here).

You can find the list of my publication here and my research interest here.

When writing my doctoral thesis, I received the Eric Sunderland IP Law Travel Scholarship awarded by the Welsh Livery Company in 2013. In 2016 and 2017, I was awarded a research scholarship at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (Munich) (See my project summary at Max Planck here).

I recently took up the position of Departmental Lecturer in IP Law at the prestigious University of Oxford. Before joining Oxford, I taught IP law at the University of Warwick (62^nd in the world) and Durham (ranked 86^th). See my teaching experience here.

Before embarking on an academic career, I completed the Legal Practice Course in Vietnam and worked for a couple of years as a tax consultant in the private sector (Ernst & Young).

Something about IP law et al.

IP law refers to a wide-ranging area of law, seeking to protect the creations of the mind: patents (telephones, pharmaceuticals, computer chips…), literary and artistic works (movies, paintings, pictures, books, articles…), computer software, trademarks (Adidas, Apple…), geographical indications (Phu Quoc fish sauce, Champagne wine…) and trade secrets (Coca-Cola drinks recipe, Google algorithm…).

“Et al.” is an abbreviation for the Latin term “et alia,” meaning “and others.” It is used in academic citations when referring to a source with multiple authors to avoid a long list of names. For example, the following article: “Compulsory licensing and innovation – Historical evidence from German patents after WWI”, has three authors: Joerg Baten, Nicola Bianchi, Petra Moser. If et al. is not in use, we must write down all three names every time we refer to this source as follow:

• Joerg Baten, Nicola Bianchi, Petra Moser, ‘Compulsory licensing and innovation – Historical evidence from German patents after WWI’ (2017) 126 Journal of Development Economics 231.

This is complicated and time-consuming, especially for articles or research papers with 5, 7, or even ten authors.

With et al., we can write the following:

• Baten J et al., ‘Compulsory licensing and innovation – Historical evidence from German patents after WWI’ (2017) 126 Journal of Development Economics 231

For this reason, et al. is so helpful!

As the name speaks for itself, this website is dedicated to not only IP law (here and here), discussing topical issues such as the COVID-19 vaccines and IPRs (here) but also many other things, most of which centre around my teaching experience in British Universities. In the future, I hope to be able to publish articles and posts written by my IP students (see here) and other guest writers.

Although knowledge sharing is the original purpose of this website, it is not the only one. I wish to bring to the attention of the world’s IP community (by writing in English) the legal issues that Vietnam is facing, such as our the national dress “Áo Dài” under threat of cultural appropriation (see more here and here) or the high profile dispute of Thần Đồng Đất Việt (literally means A Prodigy of Vietnam) (see more here). As stories such as above rarely feature in international journals, I hope this website becomes a rich reference source.

See you in my posts!

Thank you for visiting IP Law et al.