Intellectual Property

A special issue of Laws (ISSN 2075-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 March 2014) | Viewed by 30804

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
Interests: copyright; patents; trade secrets; trade marks; digital technology; internet; comparative intellectual property law; biotechnology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues

This Special Issue is devoted to examining how intellectual property laws interact with other forms of legal regulation.  In thinking about intellectual property rights, we often focus, in isolation, on the substantive law dealing with copyright, patent, trade marks, designs and trade secrets or else concern ourselves with the procedural mechanisms for enforcement of such rights.  What tends to be neglected is the relationship of intellectual property to other areas of law, including contract, tax, corporate, data protection, freedom of information, employment, consumer, human rights and criminal law. Exploring this interaction enables us to see whether the goals of intellectual property law are potentially thwarted by other forms of regulation (e.g. via contract law); or whether they are reinforced by them (e.g. through human rights and criminal law). Alternatively, it may be that that other areas of law (e.g. freedom of information) are potentially disrupted by intellectual property regulation. Further, and perhaps most importantly, how we generate innovations and cultural content, allocate the ownership of intellectual property rights and exploit intangible creations may be heavily influenced and shaped by corporate, tax, data protection/privacy and employment regimes in a particular jurisdiction and yet this impact is often overlooked.

This special issue will examine the interplay between intellectual property law and other fields of law at domestic, regional and international levels.  Jurisdiction specific as well as comparative analyses will be featured.  The articles will be readable by a broad legal audience and not limited to a single jurisdiction.

Prof. Tanya Aplin
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • intellectual property law
  • copyright
  • trade marks
  • patents
  • designs
  • trade secrets
  • ownership
  • exploitation
  • regulation
  • contract law
  • human rights law
  • criminal law
  • corporate law
  • tax law
  • employment law
  • data protection
  • privacy law

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

543 KiB  
Article
A Counterfactual Impact Analysis of Fair Use Policy on Copyright Related Industries in Singapore
by Roya Ghafele and Benjamin Gibert
Laws 2014, 3(2), 327-352; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws3020327 - 16 Jun 2014
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 8839
Abstract
Are more flexible fair use approaches, which require a test for determining whether new uses should be permitted, correlated with economic growth? Using the example of Singapore, we assess the extent to which fair use is related with growth in private copying technology [...] Read more.
Are more flexible fair use approaches, which require a test for determining whether new uses should be permitted, correlated with economic growth? Using the example of Singapore, we assess the extent to which fair use is related with growth in private copying technology and copyright markets. With reference to a differences-in-differences (DiD) methodology applied to the 2005 fair use amendments of the Singapore Copyright Act we test the law’s implications on private copying technology and copyright sectors in Singapore. The modifications of the Singapore Copyright Act were part of a set of changes of its Intellectual Property (IP) laws undertaken in the context of a Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Our findings seem to support the hypothesis that a more flexible fair use policy is correlated with faster growth rates in private copying technology industries. However, the counterfactual impact analysis did not support our second hypothesis, that flexible fair use policy would be correlated with higher growth in the copyright industries (indirectly via the growth of private copying technology industries). Thus, while the growth of copyright industries slowed down to a limited extent after 2005, the industrial group did not experience the degree of negative impact we expected. Moreover, this limited negative impact was offset by the positive impact of fair use policy correlated with higher growth in private copying technology industries. We caution that a counterfactual analysis cannot be used to attribute a causal relationship. It can only establish a correlation between a policy and a given outcome. Our findings must be read in this light. Further research, containing more comprehensive data sets and possibly also singling out international trade aspects, would benefit the debate on the interplay of copyright law and economic growth. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Intellectual Property)
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308 KiB  
Article
Registers of Artefacts of Creation—From the Late Medieval Period to the 19th Century
by Chris Dent
Laws 2014, 3(2), 239-281; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws3020239 - 4 Jun 2014
Viewed by 5039
Abstract
This paper offers a new perspective on the “development” of the intellectual property regimes in the United Kingdom. The system put in place under the 1875 Trade Marks Act may be seen as the last of a sequence of earlier “technologies” that sought [...] Read more.
This paper offers a new perspective on the “development” of the intellectual property regimes in the United Kingdom. The system put in place under the 1875 Trade Marks Act may be seen as the last of a sequence of earlier “technologies” that sought to administer the creative endeavours of (sections of) the English population. Prior to the trade mark registration (that included examination) there was the registration of designs that did not require examination but was necessary for the protection of the right. In the eighteenth century, patent specifications were lodged with the Crown via a process that was much more involved than that was instituted for designs in the nineteenth century. Before that, books had to be enrolled with the Stationers’ Company before they could be printed. And, in what may be seen as an earlier attempt at the centralised regulation of artefacts of expression, the Rolls of Arms (maintained by the King of Arms) was repository of coats of arms for English nobility. An exploration of these different technologies of regulation, in their socio-political context, will offer new insight into the antecedents, and limits, of the registration systems that are now common across the intellectual property world. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Intellectual Property)
294 KiB  
Article
Image Right and Copyright Law in Europe: Divergences and Convergences
by Tatiana Synodinou
Laws 2014, 3(2), 181-207; https://doi.org/10.3390/laws3020181 - 23 Apr 2014
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 16290
Abstract
This paper analyses the multiplicity of image rights in Europe and the classical conflictual relationship between the right to one’s own image and copyright law. First, the paper analyses the main mechanisms of legal protection of a person’s image in selected jurisdictions, in [...] Read more.
This paper analyses the multiplicity of image rights in Europe and the classical conflictual relationship between the right to one’s own image and copyright law. First, the paper analyses the main mechanisms of legal protection of a person’s image in selected jurisdictions, in both the civil law and the common law tradition. It is deduced that the civil law approach based on the right of privacy or the right of personality is expressed mainly either via a duality, reflecting the extra-patrimonial and the patrimonial attributes to one’s own image, or via the recognition of a single right with a dual nature. On the other hand, the protection granted to the right to one’s own image in the United Kingdom is piecemeal in nature, since it is based on a broad interpretation of the classic torts of breach of confidence and passing off, which fails to provide a coherent and effective legal framework for protecting the intangible asset of a person’s image, both in terms of its dignitary and its economic identity. After pinpointing the major differences in terms of protecting the right to one’s own image in Europe, the emphasis is placed on the relationship between image rights and copyright law. A classic approach considers image rights as an external limitation of copyright law, and therefore typifies the relationship between image rights and copyright law as being primarily conflictual in nature. Nonetheless, it is also possible to focus on the convergences between the right to one’s own image and copyright law, since both refer to intangible assets that combine both extra-patrimonial and patrimonial interests. In this respect, copyright law could serve as a model for the eventual creation of a European patrimonial right to one’s own image. While the idea of promoting the recognition or establishment of a new intellectual property right for protecting the economic attributes of a person’s image in EU Member States’ domestic jurisdictions, inspired by the US publicity right, is not new, and has been advanced by doctrinal circles both in the civil law and in the common law tradition, the new borderless realities of the dissemination and commodification of image, and the affirmation of strong protection for the dignitary attributes of a person’s image by the case law of the European Court of Human Rights emphasise the need for, and the feasibility of, the construction of a European patrimonial right to one’s own image. The unique prototype of copyright law consisting of a synthesis of extra-patrimonial and patrimonial interests could be used as a model for building such a right. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Intellectual Property)
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