Catherine Doldirina receives International Institute of Space Law Award for best paper

DCL candidate Catherine Doldirina has won this year's Isabella H. Ph. Diederiks-Verschoor Award and Prize for Best Paper by a Young Author from the International Institute of Space Law. She received the award while participating in the International Astronautical Congress, which was from October 12 to 16, 2009, in Daejeon, South Korea. Her paper is titled A rightly balanced intellectual property rights regime as a mechanism to enhance commercial earth observation activities.

In its commendation, the Awards Committee's mentioned that "... the author identifies the urgent need for appropriate legal rules governing the protection of the intellectual property rights (IPR) of the data thereby obtained. To this aim, the author furnishes an accurate listing of the existing norms pertaining to the protection of intellectual property rights differently originated and examines critically their applicability to EO data. Necessarily, the author arrives at constructive proposals for the creation of specific rules and thus gives a remarkable contribution to the progressive development of space law, which might promote the future growth of the remote sensing of the Earth."

Ms Catherine Doldirina is in her 3rd year as a doctoral student at McGill's Faculty of Law, within the Institute of Air and Space Law. She was the first doctoral student to receive a Boeing Fellowship in Air and Space Law, which were inaugurated in 2008. She is being supervised by Professor David Lametti.

The Faculty warmly congratulates Ms Doldirina on this well-deserved recognition.

On photo (left to right): Professor Ram Jakhu, Institute of Air & Space Law, McGill University; Ms Catherine Doldirina; and Dr. Kai-Uwe Schrogl, director of the European Space Policy Institute.