Professor David Vaver is Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto. He is also Emeritus Professor of Intellectual Property & Information Technology Law in the University of Oxford, Emeritus Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford, and former Director of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre.
Professor Vaver’s main field is intellectual property law and policy. Besides authoring Intellectual Property Law: Copyright, Patents, Trade-marks (2nd ed. 2011), Copyright Law (2000), and (as co-editor) Competition Policy and Intellectual Property Law (2009), all published by Irwin Law, he has edited a five-volume compilation, Intellectual Property Rights: Critical Concepts in Law (Routledge, 2006). He founded the Intellectual Property Journal in 1984, from which he retired as editor-in-chief in 2016 but remains on the advisory board.

Professor Vaver is an associate member of the Chambers of Iain Purvis QC (11 South Square, Gray’s Inn), a former board member of the Intellectual Property Institute (London), and a former member of the UK government’s IP Advisory Committee. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was appointed in 2016 to the Order of Canada for his “leadership in intellectual property law as a scholar and mentor.”

Professor Vaver's inaugural lecture Intellectual Property: The State of the Art appears at (2000) 116 LQR 621. Professor Vaver's post was established and generously funded until 2004 by the Reuters Foundation, the educational and charitable trust established by the leading international media and financial information group, Reuters. He will join QUB Law on 5th October 2022 to lead a seminar titled 'User Rights and Intellectual Property'.