NLSIU’s Library Committee is organising a Book Talk on the book Copyright as Personal Property, authored by Dr. Poorna Mysoor and published by the Oxford University Press. The talk will take place at the Ground Floor Conference Hall, NLSIU Training Centre, on Friday, January 9, 2026, at 5 PM. Dr. Poorna Mysoor will be in conversation with NLSIU’s Prof. (Dr.) Arul George Scaria.

The event is open to the public. Registration is mandatory for the non-NLS community. RSVP here.

About the Book

Copyright statutes in many jurisdictions clearly state that copyright is a property right. However, it is not always clear exactly how. Some see it as no more than a statutory right, while others think of it as a chose in action, like debts or shares. Copyright as Personal Property demonstrates why it is incorrect to conceptualise copyright as a chose in action and argues that, despite being an intangible asset, copyright is more analogous to land and chattels.

The book aims to achieve two main objectives. The first is to demonstrate much against popular belief that the analogies with land and chattels help contain the scope of copyright within normatively justifiable limits. Starting with the “thing relatedness” of copyright, the monograph draws parallels with the acquisition of copyright, the nature of exclusionary rights, exclusive powers and privileges, their enforcement, and derivative interests. It employs concepts of property theory, such as numerus clausus, to provide the necessary benchmark to guide the boundaries of copyright. The second objective is to challenge the rigid and binary classification of property rights into choses in possession and choses in action. By addressing an important evolutionary gap in the conceptualization of property rights, this work lays the groundwork for a more sophisticated taxonomy, viewing property rights as existing on a spectrum. It goes on to provide the metrics to calibrate this spectrum, ensuring the incremental and orderly development of property rights.

Original and thought-provoking, the analogy this book develops with land and chattels shows how the unjustifiable expansion of copyright can be curbed and offers a more sophisticated classification of property rights than that based simply on tangibility.

About the Panellists

Dr. Poorna Mysoor is a Fellow in Law at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She is also a member of Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. She was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, a Junior Research Fellow at the Queen’s College, Oxford, and an academic member at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre. She is the author of two books, Copyright as Personal Property (2025) and Implied Licences in Copyright Law (2021), both published with Oxford University Press, and has published her work widely in reputed journals and edited collections. Poorna obtained her undergraduate law degree at NLSIU, Bangalore, and an LLM from SOAS, University of London for which she was awarded the Felix Scholarship. Before embarking on her doctorate, Poorna practised intellectual property law for several years in Hong Kong and was a litigator in India.

Prof. (Dr.) Arul George Scaria is a Professor of Law and Co-Director, Centre for IP Research and Advocacy (CIPRA) at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. His expertise lies in intellectual property and competition law. He teaches, researches, and writes on issues at the intersection of law, science, and technology. Prof. Arul has been a lead researcher in different research projects, including an UNESCO funded project on challenges and opportunities for open science in four South Asian countries. He has two single authored books to his credit – Piracy in the Indian Film Industry: Copyright and Cultural Consonance (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Ambush Marketing: Game within a Game (Oxford University Press, 2008).