The world increasingly faces the adverse impact of climate change. What role can intellectual property play to stimulate the necessary innovation and technology transfer? Providing an inventory of patent law, policy and information, including certain private initiatives, this thesis discusses issues at the crossroads of intellectual property and climate change, such as: compulsory licensing for…
Defining the true meaning of the acronym FRAND reminds of the parable of two political parties arguing before the elections: who is right and who is wrong, although they both know that there is no such thing as one truth and most utterly it depends on the individual perspective. Given the very substantial legal and business concerns involved within the telecommunication standardization environm…
For many Americans the term “patent” is linked to a sense of tradition and cultural icons such as Thomas Edison, inventor of the operational incandescent light bulb. The very image of the light bulb itself has become a symbol for invention or a good idea.¹ Another commonly held notion is that a patent guarantees an individual protection from having his or her idea stolen by unscrupulous co…
“Inventions, their exploitation, and the related prior art being inherently scientific and technical in nature, have a proclivity for recordation of information directed to their development, particulars of construction, modification, and application in documents.”¹ In fact, documents, tangible items and processes embody the most vital evidence available for proving patent validity and inf…
Intellectual Property rights are expanding and, thus, overlapping more than ever before. This poses challenges to a system devised as comprising a set of isolated compartments, each with its defined purpose.The diverging rules concerning ownership and entitlement can lead to different rights on the same object being owned by different persons. What happens then? This question is addressed under…
This book discusses the implications of the 2009 EU Commission’s Pharmaceutical Sector Inquiry on originator’s opportunities to apply Intellectual Property related measures in defending against generic competition. It argues that on the one hand recent developments in EU competition law do indeed impose potential limitations on an originator’s ability to block or delay generic market entr…
How did the implementation of the EU Enforcement Directive on IP rights, which was adopted just before the expansion of the EU in May 2004, affect new EU Member States? This monograph is focused on three Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) and is aimed to present the collected information on the most relevant historic, social, economic and legal factors of those countries and to ex…
Ever since a legal concept of ‘trademark’ began to emerge after 1860,2 the law regulating trademarks has often been asked to define the contours of this ‘brand’ of property right. Modern day developments continue to raise the issue of the boundaries of trademark rights and the influence of signs and symbols on society. Terrorist attacks, political upheaval, revolutions, changing so…
This book is the result of a Master thesis written between June and early September 2014. Since then, while preparing this version, minor corrections and updates have been made. This work covers a dynamic and fascinating field of intellectual property and competition law, i.e. standardization, which I became interested in during my LL.M. studies at MIPLC. In the process of writing this thesi…
The Community system of design protection,¹ proved to be appealing for the Internal Market participants.² Its power of attraction owes largely to the fact that it grants a fast and cheap protection for a relatively long period of time. Fast, because the registered Community design does not undergo a substantive examination upon registration³ and the unregistered Community design does not req…