The winner of this year’s Lewis Gaze Memorial Scholarship was Marisa Fidalgo Frade. Her winning paper was titled: “Appropriate and proportionate remuneration to authors and artists: A legal analysis within the Portuguese legal framework”.

The Lewis Gaze Memorial Scholarship, established in 1997 as a memorial to the first Chairman and President of MARQUES, recognizes academic achievement.

Entries are invited from students attending university in the country hosting the MARQUES Annual Conference. This year, the students were from NOVA School of Law in Lisbon.

Second place was awarded to Francisco Lobão Alonso for his paper on “Repair-oriented interpretations in EU design law: Exploring exclusions and limitations”.

Third place was shared by Pedro Carrola Soares, who wrote a paper on “Morality and public policy in EU trademark law: Conceptual distinction and application in EU and Portuguese law”, and Ana Sofia Santos, whose paper was titled: “Pixels of protection: The quest to trademark AI-generated images in the EU”

All four students were presented with certificates during the Annual Conference by MARQUES Chair Claudia Pappas (pictured).

After the presentation, they took part in a short discussion about their work.

Marisa said her topic was chosen to appeal to a wide range of stakeholders, including rights management organisations. “The topic arose from my curiosity, professional as well as legal,” she said, adding: “My idea was to understand how remuneration is framed.”

Francisco described the issue of repairability and spare parts as “very contentious”, adding he looked to bring a new perspective: “I thought, how much can I stretch the legal interpretation to encompass a more welcoming mindset for enabling repairability for third parties to make spare parts, and to bring them more into the picture?” His paper reviews the history of design law and then analyses how the exclusions and limitations could apply if circularity is the main goal.

Pedro said his paper on morality and public policy in trade mark law grew out of “academic interest” in how the issue is approached in different European countries. He reviewed judgments from the EU General Court which assess “if a swear word is interpreted differently in another country, or, for example, if a name is interpreted in one way in Amsterdam and another way in Rome”.

Ana described her interest in AI-generated images as a “passion” saying: “I had a lot of fun with my examples. I had to learn about generative AI, which was also fun.”

Since September last year, Marisa has been working as in-house lawyer for a book publisher in Portugal. Francisco currently works as a lawyer at the law and advisory firm Passport Alliance, Pedro is working for an online gaming company and Ana is a contract manager at Airbus in Lisbon.

Amanda Costa Novaes of NOVA School of Law said the experience of holding the Lewis Gaze Award was “amazing”: “It’s very interesting to see the spark of the students and to see their interest in their topics, how they choose research and how they approach research.”

The School’s Masters programme in law, business and technology currently has 44 students and 15 researchers.

It wasn’t easy to choose the winner, said Amanda: “It showed we could be very proud of what we are doing and the level of research.”