Daniel J. Gervais holds the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Law at Vanderbilt Law School, and Senior Associate Professor (part-time) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is also the owner of Gervais AI & IP LLC, a consultancy focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence and intellectual property, and is based in Amsterdam. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and of Academia Europaea.
His scholarship spans more than two decades of work on the foundations of intellectual property law, with particular depth in copyright, collective management of rights, and international IP frameworks. Over the past decade, that work has turned increasingly toward the questions posed by artificial intelligence: what happens to authorship doctrine when machines can write; what inventorship means when AI generates patentable outputs; how international legal institutions can adapt to the global and technically complex nature of AI development.
The argument at the center of this site — that intellectual property law should require a genuine human cause behind the works and inventions it protects — draws together threads that run through his scholarship over many years, from early comparative work on the originality requirement in copyright law to more recent analysis of AI authorship and patent inventorship. It also connects to a broader philosophical commitment, developed in The Law of Human Progress (deLex, 2019), that law should be oriented toward human flourishing rather than the bare maximization of output.
Earlier Work
Among his earlier contributions, Feist Goes Global (2002) offered a foundational comparative analysis of the originality requirement in copyright law that has been widely cited in the literature and in courts. His work on collective management of copyright remains a standard reference in that field. He has also contributed to the literature on international IP and human rights, trademark law and sustainability, and the WTO dispute settlement system as applied to IP matters.
A parallel body of work concerns the TRIPS Agreement, the treaty that governs intellectual property rights in international trade. That scholarship, including the leading treatise on the Agreement's drafting history and interpretation, now in its fifth edition and cited by the Supreme Court of the United States and multiple Advocate General opinions at the Court of Justice of the EU, is documented at tripsagreement.com. A third site, collectivemanagement.net, documents his scholarship on collective rights management: the licensing infrastructure through which human creators are actually paid for uses of their work, and a question that sits at the heart of the current debate over how AI companies should compensate rights holders. The two bodies of work are connected: the normative commitments that animate the human cause argument were shaped, in part, by years of working with and writing about international treaty and licensing systems that were themselves built to serve human progress.
Fiction
Alongside his legal scholarship, Daniel Gervais is a fiction writer. He is the author of the Coexistence Trilogy (Forever, Together, Everywhere), a science fiction series whose central questions — about human identity, creativity, and self-determination in the face of artificial and alien intelligence — are directly continuous with the concerns of his scholarly work. He is also the author of a literary novel, Diagrams, a work of a different character that is unrelated to the themes of this site.
For more on the trilogy and its relationship to the scholarship, see The Fiction Angle and the Coexistence Trilogy website.