This book is highly topical. The shift from the multilateral WTO negotiations to bilateral and regional Free Trade Agreements has been going on for some time, but it is bound to accelerate after the WTO Doha round of negotiations is now widely regarded as a failure. However, there is a particular regional angle to this topic as well. After concluding that further progress in the Doha round was unlikely, Pacific Rim nations recently have progressed with the negotiations of a greatly expanded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement that includes industrialised economies and developed countries such as the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, recently emerged economies such as Singapore, but also several developing countries in Asia and Latin America such as Malaysia and Vietnam. US and EU led efforts to conclude FTAs with Asia-Pacific nations are also bound to accelerate again, after a temporary slowdown in the negotiations following the change of government in the United States and the expiry of the US President’s fast-track negotiation authority. The book will provide an assessment of these dynamics in the world’s fastest growing region. It will look at the IP chapters from a legal perspective, but also put the developments into a socio-economic and political context. Many agreements in fact are concluded because of this context rather than for purely economic reasons or to achieve progress in fields like IP law. The structure of the book follows an outline that groups countries into interest alliances according to their respective IP priorities. This ranges from the driving forces of the EU, US and Japan, via Asia-Pacific resource-rich but IP poor economies such as Australia and New Zealand, recently emerged economies with strong IP systems such as Singapore and Korea to leading developing countries such as China and India and ‘second tier industrializing economies’ such as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Proposes a new expert-led international instrument to address access to essential technical standards.

The constitutionalization of intellectual property law is often framed as a benign and progressive integration of intellectual property with fundamental rights. Yet this is not a full or even an adequate picture of the ongoing constitutionalization processes affecting IP. This collection of essays, written by international experts and covering a range of different areas of intellectual property law, takes a broader approach to the process. Drawing on constitutional theory, and particularly on ideas of "new constitutionalism", the chapters engage with the complex array of contemporary legal constraints on intellectual property law-making. Such constraints arising in international intellectual property law, human rights law (including human rights protection for right-holders), investment treaties, and forms of private ordering. This collection aims to illuminate the complex role of this constitutional framework, by analysing the overlaps, complementarities, and conflicts between such forms of protection and seeking to establish the effects that this assemblage of global and regional norms has on legal reform projects and interpretations of IP law. Some chapters take a broad theoretical perspective on these processes. Others focus on specific situations in which the relationship between intellectual property law and broader constitutional norms is significant. These contexts range from Art 17 of the EU's Digital Single Market Directive, to the implementation of harmonized trade secrets protection, from the role of Canada's Charter of Rights to the impact of the social model of property in Brazil.

"This book is an outcome of a partnership between the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Innovation and Competition and the South Centre, which jointly organized a Global Forum on Intellectual Property, Access to Medicine and Innovation in Munich on 9-10 December 2019"--Page v

This fully updated book offers a compact and accessible account of EU intellectual property (IP) law and policy. The digital age brings many opportunities, but also presents continuing challenges to IP law as the EU’s programme of harmonisation unfolds. As well as addressing the main IP rights (copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and related rights), the book also considers IP’s relationship with the EU’s rules on free movement of goods and competition, as well as examining the enforcement of IP rights. Taking account of numerous changes, this timely second edition covers the substantive provisions and procedures which apply throughout the EU, making extensive reference to the case law. The author considers how the exploitation of IP is increasingly global; harmonisation, in contrast, is only partial, even at the EU level. In response, the book sets EU IP law in its wider international context. It also seeks to highlight policy issues and arguments of relevance to the EU, in its relations both within the Union and with the rest of the world. Designed as a compact and approachable account of these difficult and technical areas, and with advice on further reading and research, this unique book is useful both as a work of reference and for more general study. It is essential reading for postgraduate students, academic researchers and legal practitioners alike.