This essay discusses the process of harmonization of the legislation impacting on intellectual property rights at international level and within the European Union. To this end, after an up-to-date account of the international treaties applicable within the EU and of the European Directives and...

Technological Protection Measures (TPMs) are the hard core of Digital Right Management (DRM) systems, which enforce the rights of the copyright owner in the digital environment. Copyright scholars expressed concerns that TPMs do not comply with copyright exceptions and limits (Hugenholtz 2000;...

At first sight, it may not seem like copyright plays a role in the fight against climate change and more generally the protection of the environment. But in many ways, it does, and it does so with, maybe surprisingly, quite some importance. Indeed, copyright works can be extremely varied. In the...

The predominant justification for most intellectual property rights is the incentive theory or utilitarian rationale. Behind this justification lies the Western idea of progress and its derivatives, liberalism, capitalism and consumerism. This article shows that the progress ideology rests on...

When the database sui generis right (database right) was enacted in 1996, many voices rose to criticise it vehemently. According to some, it would create an unprecedented intellectual property right on information, the latter being traditionally otherwise free, that would lead to monopolies on...

Could intellectual property rights be the cause of global warming? After all, the greatest inventions of the two last centuries include the car, the plane and with them the use of oil and coal to generate energy. They are some of the causes that contribute the most to the increase of levels of...

2014 was the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web (WWW) and as of 30 June 2014, 3,035,749,340 (ie around 3 billion and 35 million) people were connected to the Internet so a bit more than half the population of the planet. There were around 1.70 billion active smart phones in the world at the end...

This paper contributes to the question whether technology does increase subjective well-being in a society. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) document the inventiveness of a society and are a legal byproduct of innovations. The impact of these IPRs on subjective well-being are analyzed...