Estelle Derclaye

Professor of intellectual property law, University of Nottingham
Estelle Derclaye holds degrees in law from the University of Liège (Licence en droit; Diplome d'Etudes Specialisées en droit), The George Washington University (LLM) and London (PhD). She was awarded a Fulbright grant as well as Rotary and Baker & McKenzie scholarships to study for her LLM in the USA. She joined the University of Nottingham as a lecturer in 2006, became Associate Professor and Reader in Intellectual Property Law in 2009 and Professor of Intellectual Property Law in 2012. Before joining Nottingham, she practiced intellectual property in an international law firm in Brussels and prior to that, she was a lecturer at the Universities of Leicester and London (Queen Mary). Thanks to several Max-Planck Institute bursaries, she spent time at the Max-Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law (Munich) in 2002 and 2004 to work on her PhD.

Professor Derclaye's main interest is intellectual property law, in particular copyright and designs law, IP overlaps and IP and well-being. From 2008 to 2010, she was a member of the Copyright Expert Panel of the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy, which advised the UK Intellectual Property Office. In 2014, she has been appointed as a member of the unregistered rights expert advisory group advising the UK Intellectual Property Office. She is a member of the European Copyright Society, a group of European academics aiming to influence policy-making.

Professor Derclaye was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (2010) and at the University of Melbourne (2013) and a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore (2015). In 2012, as part of the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe), she was awarded funding (£61,024) to hire researchers to carry out research on copyright and open academic publishing (see literature review and PhD thesis pending on copyright) and held a stakeholders' workshop.

Professor Derclaye regularly gives lectures on copyright and design law in other law schools abroad. She has done expert work for national and foreign law firms, the UK Intellectual Property Office, the European Commission (in 2017, she co-wrote a study supporting the evaluation of the Database Directive for DG CNECT) and international organisations and welcomes requests for expert work from both the public and private sector. She also welcomes proposals for postgraduate research in all fields of intellectual property law and has supervised several PhD students to completion (see research students tab).

Professor Derclaye is the author of The Legal Protection of Databases, A Comparative Analysis (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008), editor of Research Handbook on the Future of EU Copyright (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009) and Copyright and Cultural Heritage: Preservation and Access to Works in a Digital World (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010) and co-author with A. Strowel of Droit d'auteur et numérique: logiciels, bases de données et multimédia - Droit belge, européen et comparé (Bruylant, 2001) and with M. Leistner of IP Overlaps: A European Perspective (Hart Publishing, 2011). Since 2010, she updates the European Union chapter in L. Bently (eds) International Copyright Law and Practice, Lexis Nexis. Her new edited collection "The Copyright/Design Interface: Past, Present and Future" was published with Cambridge University Press in March 2018.

Her work has been cited with approval by the UK High court in Football Dataco v Sportradar [2012] EWHC 1185 (Ch), the Swedish Court of Appeal (Stockholm) (ATG v Unibet 2011) and Advocate General Bot (cases C-393/09 and C‑128/11, BSA and Usedsoft).