Stina Teilmann-Lock is an assistant research professor at The Danish Design School.

Stina Teilmann-Lock’s area of research is design law. In her research project, which is funded by the New Carlsberg Foundation, she describes Danish copyright law in the perspective of cultural history. As part of this effort she analyses which perceptions of design form the basis of findings in the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court and the Danish Supreme Court. While legislation in the USA, for example, springs from the pre-modern notion that it is possible to distinguish between the decorative and the functional aspect of a product, Danish courts have adopted the functionalist ideology and acknowledge that form and function may form a whole.

The point of departure for Stina Teilmann-Lock’s studies is that the concept of copyright, with its distinction between original and reproduction or copy, has played a crucial role in the history of Danish design. She further examines the hypothesis that copyright protection in Denmark has only reached the level we see today thanks to leading Danish furniture designers and their ability to articulate their own role as creative artists and describe the value of their works in words.

Historically, the tradition for describing design verbally can be traced back to the 19th century, when first Great Britain and later most other countries began to place new demands on designers. When registering a new design it was no longer enough to deposit a model of one’s creation; drawings and descriptions were also required to facilitate the authorities’ systematic records. This caused designers to begin to consider their work discursively, that is, they described their work in words and gradually learned to articulate the artistic and original content of their creations. In case of litigation, designers are also required to stand up in court and speak about their work.

Stina Teilmann-Lock analyses copyright protection of Danish design and the developments in the field throughout the 20th century. Her main focus is on designers’ ability to describe their work in works and on the role of the platonic distinction between idea (work) and material (piece or copy). It is by virtue of this distinction and the historically founded awareness of the value of Danish design that the Danish brand ‘Designed in Denmark’ is able to survive, even if the trousers or the hand-painted china is produced in North Africa or Asia. She argues that the legislation on intellectual or immaterial property rights have given rise to a particular understanding: We now view a designer’s works as ‘immaterial’ and as something that can be the subject of property rights. That was not always the case, and Teilmann-Lock’s research project sets out to investigate the cultural and societal consequences of affording property rights to design.

In addition, Stina Teilmann-Lock is interested in the occurrence of and attitude toward the plagiarisation of designer products. In her research she analyses why it is considered a private matter whether someone buys a real Gucci bag or a knock-off while an entire youth culture is demonised for copying music media files etc. In most cases, both are allowed, provided the purpose is private consumption – and the owner has just a single copy or item.

Stina Teilmann holds an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Copenhagen from 2000 and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Southern Denmark in 2005 with the dissertation British and French Copyright: A Historical Study of Aesthetic Implications (published by DJØF Publishing in 2009).