When a company intends to place a new product or service on the market, it must understand the risk of infringing the third parties’ intellectual property. It is a common practice for the company to conduct a Freedom-to-Operate (FTO)¹ search to determine and reduce the risks of potential patent infringement prior to launching a new product or service. The FTO search is performed to find rele…
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…
In 1885, Germany and Portugal became neighbours in Africa. The newly founded colony of German Southwest Africa prevented the southwards expansion of the ancient colony of Angola. The border along the Cunene and Kavango Rivers remained under dispute. After the outbreak of World War I in Europe, Portugal’s neutrality was questioned in German Southwest Africa, and when a group of German official…
This paper uses the German official Police Crime Statistics to draw conclusions on the prevalence of crime in Germany, the age dependency of crime, and crime trends in the last few decades. The Police Crime Statistics allow an analysis of crime that is finely divided by types of offence and in some cases reaches far back into the past. This advantage comes with a major handicap: The statistics …
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…
Agriculture dominates the rural economy of Papua New Guinea (PNG). More than five million rural dwellers (80% of the population) earn a living from subsistence agriculture and selling crops in domestic and international markets. Many aspects of agriculture in PNG are described in this data-rich book. Topics include agricultural environments in which crops are grown; production of food crops, ca…
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…
Brazil’s insertion into the World Trade Organization (WTO) has stimulated economic growth, as the country has been benefiting from lower trade barriers. The country has accepted the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) – Annex 1C of the WTO agreement – which sets out minimum standards of protection for Intellectual Property (IP) rights. Law No. 9,279,…
The EU's data economy could double in size in the next few years if political and legal framework conditions are created in time. The EU has already taken the first step with the introduction of the GDPR, which introduced the right to data portability (RtDP). While the RtDP primarily aims to provide data subjects with greater control over their personal data, it also has a pro-competitive natur…
In this compelling title, two distinguished scholars share their experiences as expert witnesses in cases ranging from eyewitness testimony, person identification and recovered memories, to false confessions, collaborative storytelling and causal attribution, in the context of various interrogation techniques and their ability to deliver reliable results. Each chapter describes in lucid, entert…