Daniela Simone

Daniela is an intellectual property law scholar with a special interest in copyright law and the challenges of the digital age. Daniela holds DPhil, MPhil and BCL degrees from the University of Oxford and a BA (English and French)/LLB (Hons I) degree from the University of Sydney.

Daniela is a qualified lawyer and has worked at global commercial law firm, Ashurst Perkins Coie (then Blake Dawson Waldron). Prior to joining Macquarie Law School, Daniela was Lecturer in Law and Co-Director of the Institute of Brand and Innovation Law at University College London. Daniela was founder of the University of Oxford’s Intellectual Property Discussion Group (and its convenor until 2013). She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE Fellow) with extensive experience in course design and innovative, research-led teaching.

Daniela is a member of the Federal Attorney-General's Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Expert Reference Group.

Daniela’s research explores the intersection of law, technology, and culture. She is interested in collaborative authorship, artificial intelligence, the disruption new technology has brought to copyright law, regulation of the internet, the interaction between law and social norms, the international IP system, philosophy of IP, and the regulation of cultural property. Her work embraces comparative and inter-disciplinary methods and she is keen to engage directly with stakeholders.

In her monograph, Copyright and Collective Authorship: Locating the Authors of Collaborative Work (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Daniela has argued for a more inclusive and contextual approach to interpreting copyright law’s joint authorship test. This work was relied upon by the Court of Appeal (England and Wales) in a landmark case concerning the authorship of the screenplay to the film Florence Foster Jenkins, which has embedded a pro-collaboration authorship standard in UK copyright law (Kogan v Martin [2019] EWCA Civ 1645). Her recent work explores how inclusive, contextual understanding of joint authorship upheld in Kogan v Martin might improve the legal regulation of collaboration in different jurisdictional contexts (Australia, Canada and the US).

Daniela has also written on the challenges artificial intelligence might pose for copyright law both from the perspective of 'inputs' and 'outputs'. She has discussed her research at a global conference organised by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and UK Intellectual Property Office, and as an expert commentator at WIPO’s Second and Third Conversations on AI and IP. Daniela’s research has been published in top academic journals and she has presented her work in Australia, the UK, Europe and North America. 

Daniela is available to supervise research students across all aspects of copyright law. She has a particular interest in the challenges new technologies pose to key copyright concepts as well as copyright issues related to artificial intelligence, creators and the creative industries, and human rights. She is also interested in comparative/international aspects of intellectual property law, IP theory, IP and Privacy, and the protection of cultural property.