Associate Dean Daryl Lim speaks at NUS Law’s IP and tech conference

CARLISLE, Pa.— Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Partnerships Daryl Lim delivered a plenary session address at the Intellectual Property (IP) and Technology in the 21st Century conference, held during Singapore’s 60th year of independence.

In his presentation, “The Surprising Virtues of Heterogeneity: Legal Pluralism and the Governance of Generative AI,” Lim argued that the United States’s fragmented mix of privacy, publicity, and copyright laws is not a flaw but a strategic asset for regulating artificial intelligence (AI). He proposed a narrowly tailored federal “data right” to address high-risk, identity-linked uses of data, designed to complement rather than replace existing legal frameworks. The presentation reflects Lim’s ongoing scholarship at the intersection of intellectual property, technology, and innovation policy, which also informs his teaching on IP and AI law at Penn State Dickinson Law.

The IP and tech conference was co-hosted by the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Law’s EW Barker Centre for Law & Business with Columbia Law School, the University of Oxford Faculty of Law, and Tsinghua University School of Law. The event drew leading academics, practitioners, and policymakers from around the world to discuss the evolving role of intellectual property in an era of rapid technological change.

A highlight was the keynote by World Intellectual Property Organization Director General Daren Tang, who emphasized that innovation must remain human-centered in the age of generative AI. The conference is one of the region’s most prestigious academic gatherings in IP and technology law, underscoring Penn State Dickinson Law’s global engagement and faculty leadership in these fields.

Daryl Lim is the H. Laddie Montague Jr. Chair in Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. He is also the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Founding Director of the Intellectual Property (IP) Law and Innovation Initiative. At the university level, he is a co-hire at the Institute of Computational and Data Sciences and an affiliate at the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Lim is an award-winning author, observer, and commentator on national and global trends in IP and competition policy and how they influence and are influenced by law, technology, economics, and politics. He helps policymakers, attorneys, corporate counsel, scholars, and the public understand the world around them. He is a founding member of the Global IP Alliance and its local chapters in Pennsylvania and Illinois. In addition, he serves as Co-Chair of the University Education Committee in the US IP Alliance.

In December 2022, the American Law Institute elected Professor Lim to its membership based on demonstrated excellence and outstanding professional achievement. In 2023, the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission recognized him as “a leading expert in antitrust law and economics” and the IAM Strategy 300, a guide to the industry pioneers with “exceptional skill sets, as well as profound insights into the development, creation, and management of IP value,” named him to its World’s Leading IP Strategists 2023 list. In 2024, he was appointed to the consultative group advising the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. In 2025, he received the IP Professor of the Year Award at the Global Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence & Technology Conclave & Awards.