This casebook organizes contemporary foreign, as well as U.S., case law and literature to equip law students with the knowledge they need to practice intellectual property law in both transactional and litigation settings in the current globalized environment. Carefully selected materials also expose students to the social, economic, and cultural considerations that underpin intellectual property law around the world. The casebook covers aspects of public international law, conflict of laws (private international law), and comparative law of intellectual property. Each area of law copyright, patent, trademark, unfair competition, trade secrets, and industrial design is introduced by a comprehensive authors' note placing the field in its international and comparative law context, and extensive notes on the cases and materials fill in relevant details, including current and historically important topics. Materials on the major fields of intellectual property law are accompanied by materials on other related intellectual property matters, such as the protection of databases, plant varieties, geographical indications of origin, and Internet domain names.

This is the most up-to-date, complete, yet manageably-sized volume of international and regional documents and materials for a course in International Intellectual Property Law. This 2021 International Legal Materials supplement includes documents relevant to major international intellectual property law topics and can also be used for courses in international and comparative copyright law, patent law, and trademark law.

In today's globalized economy, many inventors, investors and businesses want their inventions to be protected in many, if not most, countries. However, there currently exists no single patent that will protect an invention globally, and despite the attempts in international treaties to simplify patenting, the process remains complicated, lengthy, and expensive. Furthermore, the necessity of enforcing patents in multiple countries exists without any possibility of concentrating in one location any parallel proceedings that concern the same invention and the same parties, thus making the maintenance of parallel patents infeasible.
Global Patents: Limits of Transnational Enforcement, by Marketa Trimble, explains why the absence of a "global patent" persists, and discusses the events in the 140-year history of patent law internationalization that have shaped the solutions. The author analyzes the ways in which patent holders attempt to mitigate the problems that arise from the lack of global patent protection. One way is to concentrate enforcement in one court of patents granted in multiple countries, which makes the enforcement of the patents less costly and more consistent. Another way is to attempt to use the litigation of a single country patent to reach acts that occur outside the country, which can mitigate the lack of patent protection outside the country. However, both the concentration of proceedings and extraterritorial enforcement suffer from significant limitations. Global Patents explains these limitations and presents the solutions that have been proposed to address them. The book includes a thorough comparative analysis of the extraterritorial features of U.S. and German patent laws, and original statistics on U.S. patent litigation. Based on a comprehensive treatment of the various facets of transnational enforcement challenges, the author proposes the next stage of patent law internationalization.