This study, requested by the Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) of the European Parliament, aims to provide an overview of cross-border enforcement of intellectual property rights in the EU with a particular emphasis on copyright and related rights in the online environment. The study provides a...

Statutory remuneration rights are progressively attracting the attention of policy makers as regulatory tools since they constitute a middle way between exclusivity and free uses. Remuneration rights have the potential to realise the delicate balance between access to and protection of...

The possibility of the EU member states to adapt copyright legislation to new circumstances and to address unforeseen issues is limited by the list of exceptions and restrictions of the InfoSoc Directive. In spite of this constraint, the EU copyright framework provides for a possibility of...

For millennia, Western and Eastern culture shared a common creative paradigm. From Confucian China, across the Hindu Kush with the Indian Mahābhārata, the Bible, the Koran and the Homeric epics, to Platonic mimēsis and Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” our culture was created under a...

Under a regime of limited economic incentive for creativity and confined commodification of information, humanity produced the greatest portion of human knowledge. To mention some, the Bible, the Qur'an, the Mahābhārata, the Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Scandinavian Sagas, the German Lay...

This Chapter discusses intellectual property and extra-contractual liability by highlighting general comparative analysis issues within civil and common law systems, with some consideration given also to major theoretical clusters that might influence the different legal regimes. The Chapter...

While the European Parliament overwhelmingly rejected in 2005 the directive proposal on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions, the subject remains very controversial, particularly due to the fact that the European Patent Office has maintained its practice of granting patents on...

The harmonization of the legal framework for criminal enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) at the regional and international level has since its inception been a sensitive and difficult issue, mainly due to the diverging moral and cultural legal conceptions of negotiating parties...

According to EU and international trade mark law, signs that are contrary to public policy or to accepted principles of morality may be denied registration. Public policy and morality are open legal concepts that provide a typical entrance door for fundamental rights, allowing the taking into...