Research, analysis, and
primary sources on TRIPS

Daniel J. Gervais holds the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law at Vanderbilt Law School, a Senior Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and is a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Information Law (IvIR) at the University of Amsterdam. His scholarly focus spans international IP law, artificial intelligence and copyright, and collective rights management.

Before entering academia, he served as a Legal Officer at the GATT during the Uruguay Round, as Head of Section at WIPO, and as a senior officer in the international copyright industry. He has testified before the European Parliament, the United States Congress, and the Parliament of Canada, and his work has been cited by the Supreme Court of the United States and the Supreme Court of Canada.

His more recent work addresses the questions posed by artificial intelligence for intellectual property law: what authorship and inventorship mean when machines can write and invent, and how the law should respond. That work, and the broader argument that IP law should require a genuine human cause behind the works and inventions it protects, is the focus of a companion site: thehumancause.org. His scholarship on collective rights management — the licensing infrastructure through which rights holders are remunerated, and a subject directly implicated by the AI licensing debate — is documented at collectivemanagement.net.