`Professors Flanagan and Montagnani have assembled a volume of essays recognizing that in a global information age, intellectual property is not merely a business asset, but a social phenomenon. The contributors marry consideration of fairness with exploration of efficiency, examination of economics with analysis of equity, drawing upon expertise and examples from both European and American law. The resulting collection will be an invaluable resource on both sides of the Atlantic, and around the globe.' - Dan L. Burk, University of California, Irvine, School of Law, US Intellectual Property Law examines emerging intellectual property (IP) issues through the bifocal lens of both economic analysis and individual or social justice theories. This study considers restraints on IP rights both internal and external to IP law and explores rights disequilibria from the perspective of both the rationale of IP law and the interface with competition law. The expert contributors discuss the phenomenon in various contexts of patent, trade secret; and copyright, each a tool to incentivize the growth of knowledge beyond innovation and creativity. This timely book will strongly appeal to academics, scholars, and postgraduate and PhD students interested in where and how the balance to intellectual property law is, should or could be set. Policymakers will also find this insightful resource invaluable.

The relevance of intellectual property law has increased dramatically over the last several years. Globalization, digitization, and the rise of post-industrial information-based industries have all contributed to a new prominence of IP law as one of the most important factors in driving innovation and economic development. At the same time, the significant expansion of IP rules has impacted many areas of public policy such as public health, the environment, biodiversity, agriculture, and information in an unprecedented manner. The growing importance of IP law has led to an exponential growth of academic research in this area. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the methods and approaches that could be used as guidelines to address and develop scholarly research questions related to intellectual property law. In particular, this volume aims to provide a useful resource that can be used by IP researchers who are interested in expanding their expertise in a specific research method or seek to acquire an understanding of alternative lenses that could be applied to their research. This edited collection is one of the largest compilations, to date, of existing methods and approaches from different lenses, perspectives, and experiences from a diverse group of scholars who derive from a wide range of countries, backgrounds, and legal traditions. This diversity, both regarding the topics and the authors of the contributions, is a fundamental feature of this collection, which seeks to assist IP researchers across many countries in the developing and developed world. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.