Current work
My research develops a jurisprudence of cultural works. It asks how international law might recognise a work as relational, collective, and event-based rather than as an ownable asset — and what is lost, legally and culturally, when the opposite premise prevails.
The two questions
Current work turns on two questions. The first is jurisdictional: how the legal status of a work is constituted differently across legal orders, and what that difference reveals about the ontology law assumes. The second is temporal: how copyright law binds a work to a commodifiable time — stabilising the gap between creation and market life — and what creative time looks like when it is released from that frame.
The argument
The answers to these questions form the basis of my monograph-in-progress What It Means for a Work to Live: International Law and the Capture of Culture. I argue that copyright law rests on the conceit that a work is a substance, an exchangeable asset rather than a shared inheritance. This conceit makes culture alienable, and so enables its capture by commercial platforms. It normalises possessive individualism, discourages sharing and collaboration, and reduces the circulation and transformation through which works live.
The book develops the alternative: a jurisprudence of the cultural commons, grounded in an explicit account of what a work is. It draws on critical legal studies, the theory of cultural production, and the historical record of legal artefacts — including the Spare Rib case, which shows how legal status is a jurisdictional artefact rather than a natural fact.
Kairos and chronos
Copyright measures a work's life in chronos: linear, measurable time: the fixed term of the statute and the years counted from publication. The distinction I develop in the monograph is that a work's life unfolds in kairos: the qualitative, disruptive time of circulation and transformation, of remix and revival, of community reinterpretation. A work's significance emerges through kairos: in the rereadings that carry it into contexts its author never saw. The term and the life are different things, and they rarely coincide.
Working papers and notes
Alongside the book, I maintain a set of working papers on the technical, legal, and conceptual questions that arise in the research — including the design of decentralised attribution systems, the temporality of copyright, and the ontology of the work.
Log
A chronological record of decisions, discoveries, and dead ends kept as the research proceeds.