The topic of harmonisation of European private law, and European contract law in particular, is rapidly gaining in importance. The topic is not only widely studied by academics and students all over Europe (and even beyond), it is also on the political agenda of the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Council. The most important achievement in this field is no doubt the Principles of European Contract Law (PECL), drafted by the Commission on European Contract Law. The European Commission considers the PECL to be a serious option for further harmonisation of European contract law within the European Union. This publication is the first to provide a systematic overview of the PECL in comparison with Dutch contract law as a whole. The book is concise and because of its structure it is easily accessible. Amongst the contributors there are many highly distinguished contract law specialists. It may be used at universities in courses on Comparative Law, European Private Law, and European Contract Law. It may also be used by international practitioners, foreign students, and academics interested in Dutch contract law who do not have access to Dutch contract law because they have no knowledge of the Dutch language. Last but not least, the book will be of interest to all jurists interested in the harmonisation of the European Private Law.

Patent laws are different in many countries, and inventors are sometimes at a loss to understand which basic requirements should be satisfied if an invention is to be granted a patent. This is particularly true for inventions implemented on a computer. While roughly a third of all applications (and granted patents) relate, in one way or another, to a computer, applications where the innovation mainly resides in software or in a business method are treated differently by the major patent offices in the US (USPTO), Japan (JPO), and Europe (EPO).

The authors start with a thorough introduction into patent laws and practices, as well as in related intellectual property rights, which also explains the procedures at the USPTO, JPO and EPO and, in particular, the peculiarities in the treatment of applications centering on software or computers. Based on this theoretical description, next they present in a very structured way a huge set of case studies from different areas like business methods, databases, graphical user interfaces, digital rights management, and many more. Each set starts with a rather short description and claim of the "invention," then explains the arguments a legal examiner will probably have, and eventually refines the description step by step, until all the reservations are resolved. All of these case studies are based on real-world examples, and will thus give an inexperienced developer an idea about the required level of detail and description he will have to provide.

Together, Closa, Gardiner, Giemsa and Machek have more than 70 years experience in the patent business. With their academic background in physics, electronic engineering, and computer science, they know about both the legal and the subject-based subtleties of computer-based inventions. With this book, they provide a guide to a patent examiner's way of thinking in a clear and systematic manner, helping to prepare the first steps towards a successful patent application.

Control of access to content has become a vital aspect of many business models for modern broadcasting and on-line services. Using the example of digital broadcasting, the author reveals the resulting challenges for competition, broadcasting, and telecommunications. "Controlling Access to Content" explores the relationship between electronic access control, freedom of expression and functioning competition. It scrutinizes the interplay between law and technique, and the ways in which broadcasting, telecommunications, and general competition law are inevitably interconnected. European law has widely harmonised the way conditional access is regulated in the Member States of the European Union. The author comments in detail on the relevant rules in European Court of Justice and the European Commission in its function as watchdog of European competition law. The relevant provisions in European broadcasting law, such as the right to short reporting and the so-called list of important events, are discussed extensively, as are the conditions that overrule the free-TV culture that was the essence of traditional broadcasting law. The broad and systematic screening of the existing regulatory framework makes this book an essential resource for all those who are concerned with the electronic control of access to content. With its in-depth analysis and explicit conclusions, "Controlling Access to Content" amply supplies the crucial understanding of this complex field that policy makers, regulators, and academics require. It investigates the implications of electronic access control, digitalization, and convergence for broadcasting, as well as the effects of the regulatory framework on innovation, competition, and consumer access to content. It demonstrates clearly at which points the chosen approach could backfire and generate undesirable side effects, and what lessons can be learned from the pay-TV case for other digital service sectors. Using many examples, the author explains for lawyers, consumer and industry representatives the main lines of the regulatory framework that apply to access-controlled broadcasting, how their interests are affected, and what changes the future might bring.

Individual freedom and economic prosperity depend on clearly defined and secure private property rights. Without government to define and enforce such rights, a system of private property is not possible on a large scale. At the same time, government power and oversight can provide constant threats to private property rights, leading to a sometimes contentious relationship between the interests of the individual and the state. Based on the premise that private property is important to both individual welfare and the public interest, Private Property and State Power provides an intellectual framework, accessible to an educated lay audience including government officials, for the analysis and resolution of contemporary property rights disputes--detailing the best practices for a strong system of property rights in the context of effective government.

In this brilliantly conceived and authoritative work, the eminent intellectual property specialist Nuno Pires de Carvalho focuses on the mechanisms, obligations, and opportunities of trade secret protection under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). With the powerful knowledge base derived from his long experience both at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), he illuminates the crucial relationship of antitrust and industrial property, clearly demonstrating in contrast to much received wisdom; the intrinsic pro-competitive nature of intellectual property and of industrial property in particular.Using an extraordinary wealth of practical detail, and offering hundreds of pointed hypothetical and actual examples, Pires de Carvalho dispels the murkiness around such essential concepts and provisions as the following: the inevitable interdependence of industrial property and antitrust law; abuses of patent rights and the vexed issue of patents and monopolies; the legal implications of international exhaustion under Article 6; the meaning of balance of rights and obligations under Article 7; divestiture and the fruits doctrine under Article 32; international cooperation in identifying antitrust violations in licensing agreements; protection of confidential information in court proceedings; protection of undisclosed test data against unfair commercial use under Article 39. 3; and the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism in the context of undisclosed information.Of special value in this book is the author's far-reaching analysis of the controversial emerging field of test data protection in industrial property. "The TRIPS Regime of Antitrust and Undisclosed Information" provides a practical and insightful explanation of the meaning of the relevant TRIPS provisions, of how they should be reflected in national law and how courts are expected to enforce them. It combines an easy-to-follow article-by-article commentary on the TRIPS Agreement with a theoretical scholarly analysis that makes of it an invaluable resource to all those who wish to understand industrial property rights at a deeper level. Lawyers, judges, scholars and government officials will find an abundance of information and legal analysis here that will help them identify antitrust issues and solutions to problems of trade secrets posed by the implementation of the TRIPS Agreement.

Information technology for intellectual property protection has become an increasingly important issue due to the expansion of ubiquitous network connectivity, which allows people to use digital content and programs that are susceptible to unauthorized electric duplication or copyright and patent infringement. Information Technology for Intellectual Property Protection: Interdisciplinary Advancements contains multidisciplinary knowledge and analysis by leading researchers and practitioners with technical backgrounds in information engineering and institutional experience in intellectual property practice. Through its discussions of both engineering solutions and the social impact of institutional protection, this book fills a gap in the existing literature and provides methods and applications for both practitioners and IT engineers.

This book is a collection of essays examining the remedy of contract damages in the common law and under the international contract law instruments such as the Vienna Convention on Contracts for the International Sales of Goods and the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. The essays, written by leading experts in the area, raise important and topical issues relating to the law of contract damages from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The book aims to inform readers of current developments, problems, trends and debates surrounding contract damages and reflects an ongoing dialogue on damages among representatives of common law, civil law, mixed and trans-national legal systems. The general issues addressed in the collection include the purpose and scope of damages, the measures of damages, recoverability of losses, methods of limiting damages and the assessment of damages. A special emphasis is placed on the examination of the role of gain-based damages, the meaning and definition of loss, the recoverability of damages for injury to business reputation, the recoverability of legal fees, the rules of mitigation and foreseeability, the dilemma between the 'abstract' and 'concrete' approaches to the calculation of damagesand the relationship between changes in monetary value and the assessment of damages.

This timely and innovative book delivers a comprehensive analysis of the non-recognition of the right to a family life of migrant live-in domestic and care workers in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, the Philippines, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and Ukraine.

This book presents a thorough exploration of the legal framework of EU digital copyright law from the perspective of the end-user. It provides a detailed examination of the implications that the spectacular rise of this new actor creates for the interplay between the EU copyright system and human rights law, competition law and other important policies contained in the EC Treaty. This comprehensive, book is crucial reading for lawyers, policymakers and academics.

An established trademark provides recognition valuable to trade and sales promotion, and acts as an indication of quality. These undeniable functions of the trademark must be coupled with adequate protection to avoid jeopardizing these essential aspects. The need for unification, at least at the European level, can no longer be disregarded. The Community Directive and Regulation are the response to this need. This commentary provides the texts of essential legislation and offers an analysis of the Directive and Regulation, also in their "historical" context, as seen through the eyes of leading European experts in the field. Issues such as grounds for refusal, entitlement, registration procedures, jurisdiction and procedure in legal actions and the impact of the Community Trade Mark on applicants from non-member countries are addressed. This commentary is intended for both practitioners and scholars, as well as marketing managers, for interpreting the Community provisions in this specialized and important area. Moreover, since the Council Directive and the Commission Regulations have been transformed into national laws in many Member States of the EU, this commentary should be of use in the interpretation and analysis of national European trademark laws. This work is neither too scholarly nor too elementary, but couples the strong theoretical background and practical experience of contributors stemming from diverse legal and practical cultures.

The development of private law across the common law world is typically portrayed as a series of incremental steps, each one delivered as a result of judges dealing with marginally different factual circumstances presented to them for determination. This is said to be the common law method. According to this process, change might be assumed to be gradual, almost imperceptible. If this were true, however, then even Darwinian-style evolution - which is subject to major change-inducing pressures, such as the death of the dinosaurs - would seem unlikely in the law, and radical and revolutionary paradigms shifts perhaps impossible. And yet the history of the common law is to the contrary. The legal landscape is littered with quite remarkable revolutionary and evolutionary changes in the shape of the common law. The essays in this volume explore some of the highlights in this fascinating revolutionary and evolutionary development of private law. The contributors expose the nature of the changes undergone and their significance for the future direction of travel. They identify the circumstances and the contexts which might have provided an impetus for these significant changes. The essays range across all areas of private law, including contract, tort, unjust enrichment and property. No area has been immune from development. That fact itself is unsurprising, but an extended examination of the particular circumstances and contexts which delivered some of private law's most important developments has its own special significance for what it might indicate about the shape, and the shaping, of private law regimes in the future.

An historical analysis of the development and reform of the law of prior obligations as expressed in preexisting duty rule and past consideration rule. Teeven's principal focus is on the judicial rationalization of common law reforms to partially remove the bar to enforcement of promises grounded in the past. This study traces American deviations from English common law doctrine over the past two centuries in developing theories to overcome traditional impediments to recovery presented by the law of prior obligations. It also explores ideas for further reforms found buried in past case law. The growing unease with both the dashing of legitimate consensual expectations and the perceived unfairness to naive, ill-informed, and otherwise disadvantaged parties served as the impetus for liberalization of the exclusive contract bargain test. The resultant reforms adhered to the modern realist emphasis on fairness. The expansion of contractual liability to include promises looking to the past encompasses some of the most important reforms of the consideration contract since its genesis. As a consequence, contractual liability can no longer be defined solely in terms of bargain consideration since contract law now includes a broader range of promissory liability.

The right to private property remains a compelling topic within American government, constitutional law, and both political and legal philosophy. Constitutional constraints and allowances regarding private property lead to the use - and sometimes abuse - of law in terms of ownership, individual liberty, and the needs of the state. With state and federal statutes allowing for vast oversight of private property, concerns over the proper use of authority abound on domestic and national levels. In Private Property and the Constitution, James L. Huffman outlines instances where police power, eminent domain law, and property rights have clashed in the courts. Addressing contemporary court cases, federal and state statutes, and the philosophical underpinnings of economic liberties, Huffman provides a careful analysis of private property rights within the framework of the Constitution - detailing how government interacts with public rights both successfully and unsuccessfully.

This book is the fourth in a series of essay collections on defences in private law. It addresses defences to liability arising in equity. The essays range from those adopting a mainly doctrinal perspective to others that explore the law from a more philosophical perspective. Some essays concentrate on specific defences, while others are concerned with the links between defences, or with how defences relate to the structure of the law of equity generally. One aim of the book is to shed light on equitable doctrines by analysing them through the lens of defences. The essays offer original contributions to this complex, important but neglected field of scholarly investigation. The contributors - judges, practitioners and academics - are all distinguished jurists. The essays are addressed to all of the major common law jurisdictions.

The goal of this study is to provide a general overview and thorough analysis of how the European Court of Human Rights deals with tort law issues such as damage, causation, wrongfulness and fault, the protective purpose of rules, remedies and the reduction of damages when applying art 41 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). These issues have been examined on the basis of a comprehensive selection and detailed analysis of the Court's judgments and the results compared with different European legal systems (Austria, Belgium, England and Wales, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Romania, Scandinavia, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey), EC Tort Law and the Principles of European Tort Law. The introduction of art 41 (ex art 50) ECHR in 1950 as a compromise and the issues it raises now, the methodological approaches to the tort law of the ECHR, the perspectives of human rights and tort law and public international law as well as the question of whether the reparation awarded to victims of ECHR violations can be considered real 'just' satisfaction are addressed in five special reports (two of which are also available in German). Concluding remarks try to summarise the outcome.

The European acquis communautaire in the field of property law is to a large extent still unexplored. This book shines a light on EU property law, providing an overview of the existing acquis communautaire in property law, and presenting a proposal for the future development of this field of law. It deals with the influence of the EU's four freedoms - of goods, persons, services, and capital - on national property law, and it discusses whether or not the EU would have the competence to actively create property law, as well as the extent to which it has already done so. By conducting an extensive search on the basis of some thirty key property law terms, the book has been able to uncover, not just the handful of Directives and Regulations that touch upon property law and are relatively well-known, but also hundreds of EU legislative measures that make use of property law concepts, but leave them mostly undefined. The resulting picture of EU property law is a fragmented one. In order to develop this field of law more consistently and coherently, the book proposes a framework for future EU property law, focusing on both form and content. The essence of this framework is the development of three European-autonomous property rights, functioning within a European set of property law rules. (Series: Ius Commune Europaeum - Vol. 117)

Over much of the past century, the law governing third-party importation of non-counterfeit, genuine goods has been obscured by conceptual uncertainty. In recent years, the debate over the gray market has centered on the fundamental reasons for trademark protection, and has raised the possibility of conflict between the two traditionally recognized purposes of trademark law--protecting consumers from deception and protecting trademark owners from lost sales. Hiebert discusses the evolution of the universality and territoriality principles of trademark law, and develops a new understanding of the role of goodwill in resolving trademark infringement issues. Beginning with a review of the earliest days of trademark law, Hiebert traces the development of the twofold purpose and territoriality doctrines in the United States, and examines in detail the cases, statutes, and regulations governing parallel imports. Unlike other recent treatments of the subject, this work benefits from the availability of important archival materials, and devotes considerable attention to the nineteenth-century antecedents of modern parallel importation doctrine, and to the evolution of trademark doctrine within the broader context of American legal realism.

This book explores how the entire toolbox of intellectual property (IP) protection and management are successfully combined and how firms generate value from IP. It provides a framework of archetypes which firms will be able to self-identify with and which will allow companies to focus on the IP and IP Management issues most relevant to them.

This research review provides a comprehensive overview of children's human rights. Beginning with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world, it explores the theory, doctrine, and implementation of the legal frameworks addressing child labor, child soldiers, and child trafficking, as well as children's socio-economic rights, including their rights to education. This topical research review is an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and activists.

The interface between intellectual property and other fields, such as public health and biotechnology, has raised expectations from both developed and developing countries. At the same time, a variety of issues have arisen from these relationships. Debates over public health, protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions or expressions of folklore, and the control of biological resources and access to genetic resources pose major challenges to the current global system of intellectual property. This thoughtful book serves not only to contribute to these ongoing debates but also, through in-depth analysis and well-grounded recommendations, to move them closer to resolution in a manner beneficial to all interested parties.Among the matters discussed are the following: intellectual property and public health; intellectual property and traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions or expressions of folklore; intellectual property and plant varieties, biodiversity and access to genetic resources; use of marks and other signs on the Internet; and the international framework in respect to geographical indications.Drawing on prodigious familiarity with relevant conventions and international legal instruments in the field and debates on these issues as carried out under international bodies; including the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) and the World Health Organization(WHO), as well as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the African Model Legislation, the author offers clear, well-thought-out proposals on how to respond to these issues. In the same vein, the author makes a number of proposals on how to strike a balance between the exclusive rights of the patentee and the right to public health or access to medicines, especially in the context of the HIV/AIDS crisis.In addition, holding that the owners or possessors of traditional knowledge or traditional cultural expressions or expressions of folklore are entitled to intellectual property rights protection, he advocates the development of a global and binding international protection instrument that takes particular features of these rights into consideration. He proposes the extension of the scope of applicability of the requirement of the disclosure of the country of origin of genetic resources, both at the international and national levels. He also proposes refinements to the system for multilateral notification and registration of geographical indications in respect to wine and spirits and the extension of the higher protection of geographical indications to other products and suggests new ways to approach unsettled issues arising from the use of marks or other signs on the Internet.As a deeply informed analysis of how to integrate intellectual property rights into the international development process, this book takes some giant steps toward the general recognition of the real parameters of the most severe problems plaguing the developing world and offers reachable measures toward significant improvement of those problems. It will be of interest to all professionals, officials, and academics concerned with the equitable administration of intellectual property rights.

This title flows from several panels at the Commission on Legal Pluralism Jubilee Conference, entitled Living Realities of Legal Pluralism, that was organised in conjunction with the Centre for Legal and Applied Research (CLEAR), the Research Chair in Customary Law and the Chair for Comparative Law in Africa, of the University of Cape Town. The panels highlighted controversial aspects of the legal protection of indigenous knowledge with which the contributors to this volume have critically engaged. This engagement is informed by recent legislative and policy developments in several countries in the global South, including South Africa.

"Georgia Land Surveying History and Law" is the first definitive history and analysis of Georgia's land system and the laws that govern it.

The book's opening section tells the story of the surveyor's role in transforming Georgia from a frontier to a bounded, populated, and productive colony and state. Paced by anecdotes of surveyors' wilderness experiences, the narrative traces the evolution of Georgia's land subdivision system, beginning with the original, and ultimately impractical, scheme of land granting and rectangular land subdivision under the Trustees of the Georgia Colony. The volume then covers the more flexible but easily abused headright procedure, and the subsequent lottery and succession of systematic, rectangular surveys under which most of the state was laid out and granted in the early nineteenth century.

Finally, in lay terms supported by meticulous citation of authority, the volume discusses the legal aspects of land surveying, including the interests that make up land ownership, the transfer of real property, the interpretation of property descriptions, the location of boundaries, riparian and littoral rights, and other topics. The book examines every point concerning boundaries found in any Georgia case or statute.

Based solidly on primary sources and the author's fifteen years of experience in land surveying and title abstracting, "Georgia Land Surveying History and Law" is an exhaustively researched and scholarly reference that will be useful to surveyors, title attorneys, title abstractors, real estate professionals, geographers, cartographers, historians, and genealogists.