Rate My Professor Daniela Simone

Daniela Simone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie Law School, Macquarie University, and a member of the Ethics and Agency Research Centre and Data Horizons Research Centre. She is an intellectual property law scholar with a special interest in copyright law and the challenges of the digital age. Simone holds a DPhil, MPhil, and BCL from the University of Oxford, and a BA (English and French)/LLB (Hons I) from the University of Sydney. Admitted to the Supreme Court of New South Wales, she practiced as a lawyer at the global commercial law firm Ashurst Perkins Coie (formerly Blake Dawson Waldron). Prior to Macquarie, she was Lecturer in Law and Co-Director of the Institute of Brand and Innovation Law at University College London, where she remains an Honorary Lecturer until 2026. A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, she is also a member of the Federal Attorney-General's Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Expert Reference Group. Simone founded and convened the University of Oxford’s Intellectual Property Discussion Group until 2013.

Her research examines the intersection of law, technology, and culture, including collaborative authorship, artificial intelligence, technological disruptions to copyright law, internet regulation, the philosophy of intellectual property, and cultural property protection. Employing comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, she engages stakeholders directly. Simone's monograph, Copyright and Collective Authorship: Locating the Authors of Collaborative Work (Cambridge University Press, 2019), was cited by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in the landmark case Kogan v Martin [2019] EWCA Civ 1645, embedding a pro-collaboration authorship standard in UK copyright law. Notable publications include 'Joint authorship in copyright law: flexibilities to future-proof the test' (Melbourne University Law Review, 2025), 'Do you copy? Attributing copyright infringement to actors involved in text-to-image generative artificial intelligence' with A. Wojciechowski (UNSW Law Journal, 2025), and 'Kogan v Martin: a new framework for joint authorship in copyright law' (Modern Law Review, 2020). She has delivered over 30 invited talks worldwide, including at World Intellectual Property Organisation conferences, and teaches Intellectual Property Law at Macquarie while supervising PhD students on copyright, AI, and international IP topics. Her scholarship influences policy, commercial practices for creators, and cultural crediting in collaborative works.