Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights
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Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights
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.
Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights
This title considers the overlap between intellectual property rights. Individual chapters examine discrete pairs of IP rights, with a series of comparison tables setting out the law regarding IP rights across the world.
Intellectual Property Overlaps
Intellectual property is traditionally split into three main segments that of copyright, patents and trademarks. In theory, each category of intellectual creations should belong in only one segment of the system and only to the extent authorized by relevant statutory provisions or judicial doctrines. However, as the scope of each segment expanded, their boundaries began to overlap, which resulted in consequences that had not been anticipated at the time of their inception and the issue of intellectual property rights overlaps surfaced. When the statutory monopoly expires, most intellectual property rights should vest in the general public. In practice however, due to overlaps of the segments comprising intellectual property system, some of the creations or inventions have qualities that make them capable of being protected under more than one intellectual property monopoly. For example, a machine can be protected under patent law, but drawings of that machine could enjoy copyright protection. The book identifies the complex interfaces between different intellectual property rights, especially in the context of new technologies, such as computer programs and the internet. The book considers intellectual property rights and their overlaps in light of the right's purposes, relying on the concept of balance of rights as the measuring rod for assessment of the consequences resulting from use of the overlapping rights. In doing so the book investigates how use of intellectual property rights associated with one segment of the system can affect carefully crafted balance of rights of various stakeholders in an overlapping segment and whether effectiveness of this segment to advance its purposes will be impeded by such use. The book considers experiences of different jurisdictions with the overlaps, the US, the UK, and Canada in particular. The book also presents solutions to identified and potentially objectionable uses of overlapping rights in an attempt to provide judiciary and law practitioners with analytical framework for resolving disputes involving overlaps in the intellectual property system. In particular, it 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.