This comprehensive Research Handbook explores empirical legal studies of intellectual property law. It covers research from four continents and offers unique conclusions to aid in the creation and understanding of policies and legislation. By combining research from both leading experts and up-and-coming scholars, this expansive Research Handbook examines the four main intellectual property rights: patent, trademark, design and copyright, as well as trade secrets. Chapters provide cutting-edge empirical data and projections on legislation and case law, using quantitative and qualitative methods, including surveys, interviews, descriptive and inferential statistics. The Research Handbook on Empirical Studies in Intellectual Property Law will be highly beneficial for scholars and advanced students of intellectual property, in both legal and economic disciplines, and will inspire new research directions. Practitioners and policymakers will also be interested as the chapters offer statistics on which client advice and policymaking can be based.

Thanks to digitisation and the Internet, preservation of and access to our cultural heritage - which consists of works protected by copyright and works in the public domain - have never been easier. This essential book examines the twin issues of the preservation of, and access to, cultural heritage and the problems copyright law creates and the solutions it can at the same time provide. The expert contributors explore the extent to which current copyright laws from Europe and beyond prevent or help the constitution of a centralized online repository of our cultural heritage. Provided legal reform is achieved and the additional financial and organisational hurdles are overcome, this work argues that it should be possible to fulfill the dream of an online Alexandrian library. Copyright and Cultural Heritage will appeal strongly to both academics and practitioners of intellectual property as well as to policymakers - as it proposes modifications to copyright law in the UK and beyond. This book will also provoke thought amongst associated and interested parties from industry and those using, managing or distributing content.

The protection of the investment made in collecting, verifying or presenting database contents is still not harmonised internationally. Some laws over-protect database contents, whilst others under-protect them. This book examines and compares several methods available for the protection of investment in database creation - namely, intellectual property, unfair competition, contract and technological protection measures - in order to find an adequate type and level of protection. To this effect, the author uses criteria based on a combination of the economics of information goods, the human rights to intellectual property and to information, and the public interest, proposing a model that can be adopted at international and national levels. The Legal Protection of Databases will be of interest to intellectual property lawyers, competition lawyers, as well as general commercial lawyers because of the breadth of laws reviewed. It will also appeal to practitioners, policymakers, economists and students.

It has been over fifteen years since the EU started harmonising copyright law. This original Handbook takes stock and questions what the future of EU copyright should be. What went wrong with the harmonisation acquis? What did the directives do well? Should copyright be further harmonised? Each of the 25 recognised copyright experts from different European countries gives a critical account of the EU harmonisation carried out on several aspects of copyright law (subject-matter, originality, duration, rights, defences etc.), and asks whether further harmonisation is desirable or not. This way, the Handbook not only gives guidance to European institutions as to what remains to be done or needs to be remedied but is also the first overall picture of current and future EU copyright law. This Handbook will be of great interest to academics and intellectual property lawyers, as well as general commercial lawyers, across Europe because it reviews European directives in the field of copyright and also the relationships between copyright and other laws. Policymakers will also find much to interest them in the discussions regarding the future of EU copyright law and the proposed amendments to the existing legal framework.

Intellectual property rights, conventionally seen as quite distinct, are increasingly overlapping with one another. There are several reasons for this: the expansion of IPRs beyond their traditional borders, the creation of new IPRs especially at EU level, the exploitation of gaps in the law by shrewd lawyers, and the use of unfair competition as an alternative when IPRs are either not available at all or expired. The convergence of several IPRs on the same subject-matter poses problems. As they are normally envisaged as water-tight categories, there are very few rules which cater for the sort of regime clash that any overlap of IPRs necessarily entails. This book's aim is to find appropriate rules to regulate overlaps and thereby avoid regime conflicts and undue unstructured expansion of IPRs. The book studies the practical consequences of each overlap at the international, European and national levels (where the laws of France, the UK and Germany are reviewed). It then analyses the reasons for the prohibition or authorisation of overlaps. This analysis enables the determination of criteria and principles that can be used to (re)map the overlaps to achieve appropriateness and legitimacy.

Protecting designs is complex and diverse; it involves deciding whether to protect them by design law, copyright law, or by both laws. A single protection may be under- or overprotective but two or more can be overprotective if there are no rules regulating the overlap. Legal systems in Europe and abroad have struggled to find the most adequate solution to this problem. This book traces the history of the design/copyright interface of fifteen countries, selected for their diversity in the way they dealt with the interface. It examines how these countries have coped with the problems engendered by the interface, the rules they applied to it over time and the reasons for legislative changes. This analysis reveals the most appropriate rules to regulate the interface at EU and global level and will appeal to academics, practising lawyers, judges, students and policymakers all over the world.