Hong Kong, 25–26 July 2025 – The 17th Intellectual Property Conference concluded successfully. Jointly hosted by CUHK Faculty of Law, CLINDS, Kinect Law, IIAI and AIIPS, with Lifang & Partners as a supporting firm, the event gathered global scholars and practitioners under the theme “AI: Redrawing the Frontiers of Knowledge”. Four of the firm's partners—Zheng Xilin, Annie Xue, Zhang Yan, Deng Yao—took the podium.

Mr. Zheng Xilin structured his remarks around four pivots: (i) Global capital flows—sectoral allocation and the public-private split in AI finance; (ii) The feedback loop between fast-evolving tech (generative models, edge compute) and emergent regulation that rewires investment calculus; (iii) The U.S.–China multi-front contest for R&D primacy, talent, patents and standards—and its systemic macro-economic fallout; (iv) Strategic openings for market actors navigating epochal disruption.

Dr. Annie Xue, mapped the divergent regulatory architectures emerging from China, America, and EU, then leveraged the EU investigations into DeepSeek and TikTok to illustrate the compliance gauntlet confronting Chinese AI companies abroad.

Mr. Zhang Yan distilled fresh Chinese jurisprudence to chart a coherent path to copyright subsistence for AIGC, parsed the elements of infringement and criminal liability, and canvassed layered protection strategies for model architectures and parameters—while showcasing concrete enforcement use-cases for AI in rights-protection workflows.

Mr. Deng Yao attended the round table and turned to intangible cultural heritage. Arguing that AI can never harvest what has never been digitised, he underscored the irreplaceable value of scholars conducting fieldwork among communities whose knowledge remains offline and unarchived—knowledge rendered more precious by AI's very omnipresence.