Dr Chen Zhu

• LLB (SISU, Shanghai)
• LLM (with Distinction, Edinburgh)
• PhD (LSE)

Dr Chen Zhu is an Associate Professor at Birmingham Law School, where he teaches and researches intellectual property and informational jurisprudence. He earned his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh.

Dr Zhu’s research engages with the evolving socio-material conditions that shape the construction and regulation of diverse intellectual property subject matters. His current scholarship concentrates on music copyright, with a particular emphasis on the use of music evidence in copyright litigation and the complex challenges arising from recent developments in forensic musicology. He is the co-editor of Music Borrowing and Copyright Law (Hart, 2023), a critically-acclaimed collection of research essays by music and law experts from around the world. He is also the author of the 8th edition of Bainbridge’s Information Technology and Intellectual Property Law (Bloomsbury, 2027).

•  Intellectual Property Law (LLB, module leader)
• Intellectual Property Law (advanced topics, LLM, module leader)
• Creative Industries and Law (MA, co-module leader)
• Intellectual Property and Technology (LLM, forthcoming)
• Critical Sports Law (LLB, forthcoming)

Dr Zhu considers postgraduate research proposals falling into the following areas:

- Historical and Theoretical Aspects of Copyright Law
- Legal Construction of Authorship
- Music Copyright Law
- Software Related Intellectual Property Issues

Find out more - our PhD Law  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My long-term research ambition is driven by an intellectual quest for understanding IP as a legal form of regulating creative activities in an ever-changing intellectual ecosystem. Copyright, as a bewilderingly dynamic component of IP, plays an important role in expanding its reach and now covers almost every aspect of day-to-day human creations. Starting from the Statute of Anne of 1709/1710 – normally regarded as the first modern copyright act – copyright, over the past three centuries, has undergone a tremendous expansion. Copyright nowadays covers not only “books” but also a sweeping range of non-literary works – including music, maps, paintings, photographs, sound recordings, films, software programs and databases. In this scenario, my research has two interweaving themes. The first one studies Creative Authorship as Cultural and Legal Constructs, while the second—inspired by Ian Macneil’s seminal writings on Relational Contract Theory—proposes  a normative framework called “Digital Relational Contract” to cope with the many challenges posed by the fast-growing digital technologies. Combining these two themes, I hope to build a coherent relational framework for understanding a more distributed copyright system that will nurture and encourage both individual and collaborative creativity in a sustainably long-term way. 

In addition, I am interested in computational methods for conducting data-driven legal research and pedagogy. I have been dabbling in software programming with the text editor GNU Emacs, which is equipped with a dialect of the LISP language. I programme with LilyPond and Sonic Pi for doing my music copyright research.