Providing a comprehensive and systematic commentary on the nature of overlapping Intellectual Property rights and their place in practice, this book is a major contribution to the way that IP is understood. IP rights are mostly studied in isolation, yet in practice each of the legal categories created to protect IP rights will usually only provide partial legal coverage of the broader context in which such rights are actually created, used, and enforced. Consequently, often multiple IP rights may overlap, in whole or in part, with respect to the same underlying subject matter. Some patterns, for instance, in addition to being protected from copying under the design rights regime, may also be distinctive enough to warrant trade mark protection. Each chapter addresses a discrete pair of IP rights and is written by a specialist in that area. Facilitating an understanding of how and when those rights may be encountered in practice, each chapter is introduced by a hypothetical situation setting out the overlap discussed in the chapter. The conceptual and practical issues arising from this situation are then discussed, providing practitioners with a full understanding of the overlap. Also included is a valuable summary table setting out the legal position for each set of overlapping rights in jurisdictions across Europe, Central and South America, and Asia, and the differences between them.

Intellectual property rights and their overlaps are considered in light of rights purposes, relying on the concept of a balance of rights as the measuring rod for assessment of the consequences resulting from the exercise of overlapping rights. Identifying the complex interface between different types of intellectual property rights, this book discusses the use of these rights and their effect on a diverse group of stakeholders, from individual users of e-books to large corporations operating search engines on the internet. The book suggests solutions to potentially objectionable uses of overlapping rights in an attempt to provide judiciary and law practitioners with an analytical framework for resolving disputes of overlaps in the intellectual property system. In doing so, the author investigates how use of intellectual property rights associated with one segment of the system can affect the carefully crafted balance of rights held by various stakeholders in an overlapping segment. In particular, the book suggests that a properly construed doctrine of misuse of intellectual property rights would provide an adequate response to the challenge posed by improper use of overlapping intellectual property rights. This book is of particular interest to law practitioners, managers in advanced technology and media industries, academics, and university students who work with or analyze intellectual property and new technologies.

Intellectual property rights, conventionally seen as quite distinct, are increasingly overlapping with one another. There are several reasons for this: the expansion of IPRs beyond their traditional borders, the creation of new IPRs especially at EU level, the exploitation of gaps in the law by shrewd lawyers, and the use of unfair competition as an alternative when IPRs are either not available at all or expired. The convergence of several IPRs on the same subject-matter poses problems. As they are normally envisaged as water-tight categories, there are very few rules which cater for the sort of regime clash that any overlap of IPRs necessarily entails. This book's aim is to find appropriate rules to regulate overlaps and thereby avoid regime conflicts and undue unstructured expansion of IPRs. The book studies the practical consequences of each overlap at the international, European and national levels (where the laws of France, the UK and Germany are reviewed). It then analyses the reasons for the prohibition or authorisation of overlaps. This analysis enables the determination of criteria and principles that can be used to (re)map the overlaps to achieve appropriateness and legitimacy.

Provides an in-depth assessment of the exhaustion doctrine and explores how its various implementations have shaped international trade issues.

While intellectual property rights are mostly studied in isolation, in practice the legal categories created to protect these rights provide only partial legal coverage of the broader context in which such rights are created, used, and enforced. Consequently, often multiple IP rights overlap with respect to the same underlying subject matter. This book enables readers to consider how these overlapping rights work together, facilitating a deeper understanding of how and when they may be encountered in practice. Each chapter addresses a discrete pair of IP rights and uses a hypothetical scenario to analyse particular conceptual and practical issues, giving practitioners a comprehensive understanding of the overlap. While the focus of these IP rights is on UK, US and European law, the book also contains comparison tables of overlapping IP rights in other countries around the world. These tables complement the chapters, offering a detailed overview as to how these overlaps apply in different legal jurisdictions, as well as how they differ.

We live in an age in which expressive, informational, and technological subject matter are becoming increasingly important. Intellectual property is the primary means by which the law seeks to regulate such subject matter. It aims to promote innovation and creativity, and in doing so to support solutions to global environmental and health problems, as well as freedom of expression and democracy. It also seeks to stimulate economic growth and competition, accounting for its centrality to EU Internal Market and international trade and development policies. Additionally, it is of enormous and increasing importance to business. As a result there is a substantial and ever-growing interest in intellectual property law across all spheres of industry and social policy, including an interest in its legal principles, its social and normative foundations, and its place and operation in the political economy. This handbook written by leading academics and practitioners from the field of intellectual property law, and suitable for both a specialist legal readership and an intelligent but non-specialist legal and non-legal readership, provides a comprehensive account of the following areas: - The foundations of IP law, including its emergence and development in different jurisdictions and regions; - The substantive rules and principles of IP; and - Important issues arising from the existence and operation of IP in the political economy.

In today’s knowledge-based global economy, most inventions are made by employed persons through their employers’ research and development activities. However, methods of establishing rights over an employee’s intellectual property assets are relatively uncertain in the absence of international solutions. Given that increasingly more businesses establish entities in different countries and more employees co-operate across borders, it becomes essential for companies to be able to establish the conditions under which ownership subsists in intellectual property created in employment relationships in various countries. This comparative law publication describes and analyses employers’ acquisition of employees’ intellectual property rights, first in general and then in depth. This second edition of the book considers thirty-four different jurisdictions worldwide. The book was developed within the framework of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AIPPI), a non-affiliated, non-profit organization dedicated to improving and promoting the protection of intellectual property at both national and international levels. Among the issues and topics covered by the forty-nine distinguished contributors are the following: • different approaches in different law systems; • choice of law for contracts; • harmonizing international jurisdiction rules; • conditions for recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments; • employees’ rights in copyright, semiconductor chips, inventions, designs, plant varieties and utility models on a country-by-country basis; • employee remuneration right; • parties’ duty to inform; and • instances for disputes. With its wealth of information on an increasingly important subject for practitioners in every jurisdiction, this book is sure to be put to constant use by corporate lawyers and in-house counsel everywhere. It is also exceptionally valuable as a thorough resource for academics and researchers interested in the international harmonization of intellectual property law.

This volume is for students and scholars of intellectual property law, practitioners seeking creative arguments from across the field, and policymakers searching for solutions to changing social and technological issues. The book explores the tensions between two fundamentally competing demands made of IP law.

Reforming Intellectual Property brings together 19 of the world’s leading scholars in the field to offer their unique insight into the future of intellectual property. Providing a diverse array of perspectives on the most pressing reforms needed in the current IP regime, whether in terms of legislation at national and international levels, or interpretation of existing law, this exceptional book highlights the key issues in this area and sets out an agenda for future research and policy.

This book explores the economic analysis of intellectual property law, with a special emphasis on the Law and Economics of informational goods in light of the past decade’s technological revolution. In recent years there has been massive growth in the Law and Economics literature focusing on intellectual property, on both normative and positive levels of analysis. The economic approach to intellectual property is often described as a monolithic, coherent approach that may differ only as it is applied to a particular case. Yet the growing literature of Law and Economics in intellectual property does not speak in one voice. The economic discourse used in legal scholarship and in policy-making encompasses several strands, each reflecting a fundamentally different approach to the economics of informational works, and each grounded in a different ideology or methodological paradigm. This book delineates the various economic approaches taken and analyzes their tenets. It maps the fundamental concepts and the theoretical foundation of current economic analysis of intellectual property law, in order to fully understand the ramifications of using economic analysis of law in policy making. In so doing, one begins to appreciate the limitations of the current frameworks in confronting the challenges of the information revolution. The book addresses the fundamental adjustments in the methodology and underlying assumptions that must be employed in order for the economic approach to remain a useful analytical framework for addressing IPR in the information age.