This study addresses the most important legal issues when implementing an open access e-infrastructure for research data. It examines the legal requirements for different kinds of usage of research data in an open access infrastructure, such as OpenAIREplus, which links them to publications. The existing legal framework regarding potentially relevant intellectual property (IP) rights is analyse…
Are intellectual property rights like other property rights? More and more of the world’s knowledge and information is under the control of intellectual property owners. What are the justifications for this? What are the implications for power and for justice of allowing this property form to range across social life? Can we look to traditional property theory to supply the answers or do we n…
Intellectual, biological and cultural property rights are a powerful and debatable topic. They offer the possibility for protection of rights to intangible resources, including the products of knowledge and creativity. The forces of globalisation have made this subject of immediate, international concern. Struggles for ownership of intellectual property occur between and within local and global…
What is at stake for how the Internet continues to evolve is the preservation of its integrity as a single network. In practice, its governance is neither centralised nor unitary; it is piecemeal and fragmented, with authoritative decision-making coming from different sources simultaneously: governments, businesses, international organisations, technical and academic experts, and civil society.…
A movement emerges to challenge the tightening of intellectual property law around the world. At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened t…
The emergence of the Internet and the digital world has changed the way people access, produce and share information and knowledge. Yet people in Africa face challenges in accessing scholarly publications, journals and learning materials in general. At the heart of these challenges, and solutions to them, is copyright, the branch of intellectual property rights that covers written and related w…
Creativity and Its Discontents is a sharp critique of the intellectual property rights (IPR)–based creative economy, particularly as it is embraced or ignored in China. Laikwan Pang argues that the creative economy—in which creativity is an individual asset to be commodified and protected as property—is an intensification of Western modernity and capitalism at odds with key aspects of Chi…
The private international law of intellectual property is currently much debated both in Europe and abroad. Art. 8 of the Rome II Regulation of 2007, which codifies a territorial approach for the infringement of intellectual property, has provoked an intensive discussion in Europe as to whether the lex loci protection is still appropriate for intellectual property litigation in the age of world…
India and the Patent Wars examines struggles over patents and access to medicine among pharmaceutical producers, activists and others under a new global intellectual property regime. In the past two decades, intellectual property rights have expanded throughout the globe creating a world in which protections for patents and copyrights have increased and a growing range of knowledge and practice…
Although open content licences only account for a fraction of all copyright licences currently in force in the copyright world, the mentality change initated by the open content movement is here to stay. To promote the use of open content licences, it is important to better understand the theoretical underpinnings of these licences, as well as to gain insight on the practical advantages and inc…