A New Beginning for the European Patent System

By Luke McDonagh.

Until recently, only scant data were publicly available on the subject of patent litigation in EU member states, and as a result it was difficult to accurately examine how prevalent patent litigation was from state to state, how costly it was and how significant the divergences were between the various systems. However, in recent years a number of major studies – based on analysis of carefully gathered empirical patent case data – have been published. These studies have shed new light on the subject of patent litigation in EU member states, particularly in the major jurisdictions of the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands, where the vast majority of European patent ligation takes place. […]

There have long been significant concerns about how international trade agreements affect Indigenous rights, particularly in respect of Indigenous Intellectual Property. As highlighted in our recent handbook on Indigenous Intellectual Property, there has been an ongoing conversation about the relationship between Indigenous communities, intellectual property, and trade. Such discussions have traditionally taken place in multilateral fora like the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, international climate talks, and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples. Of late, the debate has also arisen in the context of bilateral trade agreements such as the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement 1994, and mega-regional trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership 2015. Matthew Rimmer goes on to discuss.

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of Changeover day: when Australia swapped from pounds to the new decimal currency. But the “C” in Changeover day might equally stand for Copyright day, for it marks the first Aboriginal copyright dispute. Stephen Gray goes on to explain.

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Intellectual property is in global turmoil. This is not surprising. In many industrialized countries, ‘intangible’ assets make up 70% or more of the economy, and intellectual property rights (IPRs) are a way to create incentives to generate those assets and then to protect those assets. Susy Frankel and Daniel Gervais go on to discuss, that from a rather obscure and technical topic for a few specialist lawyers, intellectual property since the 1980s has progressively become a major focus of business strategists, trade negotiators and developmental economists.

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photograph: Jared Zammit (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The complex mass of data that underpins everything from trade to entertainment presents many legal challenges. Robert Cunningham considers what lessons from environmentalism we can apply to the way we manage and run our information world. […]