A Framework for Thinking about Intellectual Property Subject Matter

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ip Law ◽  
Normative Value

This chapter proposes a framework for thinking about the subject matter protectable by intellectual property (IP) and related questions of analytic assistance. The proposed framework is built around certain devices of philosophy, including the artifact, types and tokens, the category, and the property. In combination, these devices support a paradigmatic or focal conception of the subject matter protectable by European and UK IP law. According to that conception, IP subject matter are artifact types distinguished by their properties and categorized accordingly. The analytic and normative value of this conception is discussed, and certain distinctions of importance for IP subject matter outlined, complementing those identified in Chapter 2. The questions of analytic assistance derived from the framework concern the essential properties of IP subject matter, the method of their individuation, their relationship with their concrete instances or tokens, and the manner by which their and their tokens’ existence is known.

The Subject Matter of Intellectual Property

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Final Stage ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Trade Mark ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The Relationship

This book offers a study of the subject matter protected by each of the main intellectual property (IP) regimes. With a focus on European and UK law particularly, it considers the meaning of the terms used to denote the objects to which IP rights attach, such as ‘invention’, ‘authorial work’, ‘trade mark’, and ‘design’, with reference to the practice of legal officials and the nature of those objects specifically. To that end it proceeds in three stages. At the first stage, in Chapter 2, the nature, aims, and values of IP rights and systems are considered. As historically and currently conceived, IP rights are limited (and generally transferable) exclusionary rights that attach to certain intellectual creations, broadly conceived, and that serve a range of instrumentalist and deontological ends. At the second stage, in Chapter 3, a theoretical framework for thinking about IP subject matter is proposed with the assistance of certain devices from philosophy. That framework supports a paradigmatic conception of the objects protected by IP rights as artifact types distinguished by their properties and categorized accordingly. From this framework, four questions are derived concerning: the nature of the (categories of) subject matter denoted by the terms ‘invention’, ‘authorial work’, ‘trade mark’, ‘design’ etc, including their essential properties; the means by which each subject matter is individuated within the relevant IP regime; the relationship between each subject matter and its concrete instances; and the manner in which the existence of a subject matter and its concrete instances is known. That leaves the book’s final stage, in Chapters 3 to 7. Here legal officials’ use of the terms above, and understanding of the objects that they denote, are studied, and the results presented as answers to the four questions identified previously.

The Design

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
Design Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Property Regimes

This chapter defines the terms used to denote the subject matter protectable by European and UK registered and unregistered design right with reference to legal officials’ understanding of each type of subject matter. Starting from a recognition of the intersection of the design right and other intellectual property regimes, the chapter considers several aspects of design law before concluding that designs are authorial works within the meaning of European or traditional UK copyright authorities, albeit with a different history of production than that traditionally required of such works by UK legal officials. The chapter concludes with a summary of the categories and essential properties of registered and unregistered designs, an account of legal officials’ methods for individuating them, and a discussion of the relationship between legal officials’ methods of establishing the existence of individual registered and unregistered designs and their tokens respectively.

Justine Pila, The Subject Matter of Intellectual Property

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-144
Author(s):  
Patrick Masiyakurima
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Subject

The Trade Mark, Other Product Designations, and Goodwill

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Trade Mark ◽  
Geographical Indication ◽  
Passing Off ◽  
Rights Protection ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers the meaning of the terms that appropriately denote the subject matter protectable by registered trade mark and allied rights, including the common law action of passing off. Drawing on the earlier analyses of the objects protectable by patent and copyright, it defines the trade mark, designation of origin, and geographical indication in their current European and UK conception as hybrid inventions/works in the form of purpose-limited expressive objects. It also considers the relationship between the different requirements for trade mark and allied rights protection, and related principles of entitlement. In its conclusion, the legal understandings of trade mark and allied rights subject matter are presented as answers to the questions identified in Chapter 3 concerning the categories and essential properties of the subject matter in question, their method of individuation, and the relationship between and method of establishing their and their tokens’ existence.

Definitions and Intellectual Property Subject Matter

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Pila
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Legal Definition ◽  
Policy Context ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This chapter considers the relative absence of scholarly attention to the meaning of the terms used to denote the subject matter that IP rights protect and the nature of those subject matter themselves. It then outlines the aims and methods of the definitional task undertaken in later chapters, and the stages in which that task proceeds. Using the distinction drawn by Richard Robinson, it proposes a nominal word:thing definitional exercise, rather than a word:word exercise, that considers recent use of the terms to be defined by European and UK legal officials. Drawing on the stipulative nature of authoritative legal definition, it also proposes an explicative aspect to the definitional exercise, focused on clarifying legal officials’ understandings of the relevant terms in the light of the relevant legal and policy context. And finally, it summarizes the conclusions reached at each stage of the definitional exercise undertaken in later chapters.

Directions in Intellectual Property Law Research: A Linguistic Contribution

2021 ◽  
pp. 344-360
Author(s):  
Alan Durant ◽  
Jennifer Davis
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Policy Formation ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Concurrent Use ◽  
Subject Areas ◽  
Ip Law ◽  
Legal Meaning

The questions in intellectual property (IP) law which most directly engage language fall into several types. ‘Language’ questions may concern particular signs or stretches of language examined for their registrability as a trademark, or disputed in relation to alleged infringement of literary copyright. Other kinds of words and phrases may also create difficulty, such as the words ‘distinctive’ or ‘generic’ which describe features of, and categorize, such signs or stretches of language. Such words and phrases establish a metalanguage that overlaps with frameworks in linguistics (e.g. ‘noun’, ‘consonant’) yet differs from such frameworks both in detail and purpose. Across all IP subject areas, a further kind of language, the field’s legal terms of art, defines the intangible subject matter, doctrines, and rationales of IP law, giving specialized legal meaning to otherwise general words and phrases whose meaning in law may nevertheless be contested. Such terms remain in concurrent use beyond law, with related but different meanings, and may therefore also be problematic when relied on in policy formation and in public debate about what IP is. ‘Language’ in these and other IP contexts is not, we argue, a single, unified topic. Rather, it consists of a number of very different kinds of language use, which raise different questions and call for varied forms of analysis. This chapter describes and illustrates those specialized kinds of language use. It also discusses prominent examples of research into them by legal scholars and linguists, and highlights further topics that may be amenable to linguistic investigation. In conclusion, we explain why specialist linguistic expertise is less important in such study of than interdisciplinary, legal and linguistic collaboration.

Essentialism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Hard Part ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Definition Of

Essentialists maintain that an object’s properties are not all on an equal footing: some are ‘essential’ to it and the rest only ‘accidental’. The hard part is to explain what ‘essential’ means. The essential properties of a thing are the ones it needs to possess to be the thing it is. But this can be taken in several ways. Traditionally it was held that F is essential to x if and only if to be F is part of ‘what x is’, as elucidated in the definition of x. Since the 1950s, however, this definitional conception of essence has been losing ground to the modal conception: x is essentially F if and only if necessarily whatever is x has the property F; equivalently, x must be F to exist at all. A further approach conceives the essential properties of x as those which underlie and account for the bulk of its other properties. This entry emphasizes the modal conception of essentiality. Acceptance of some form of the essential/accidental distinction appears to be implicit in the very practice of metaphysics. For what interests the metaphysician is not just any old feature of a thing, but the properties that make it the thing it is. The essential/accidental distinction helps in other words to demarcate the subject matter of metaphysics. But it also constitutes a part of that subject matter. If objects have certain of their properties in a specially fundamental way, then this is a phenomenon of great metaphysical significance.

Ch.3 International Exhaustion of Rights

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Correa Carlos Maria
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Intellectual Property Rights ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Dispute Settlement ◽  
Foreign Market ◽  
Trips Agreement ◽  
Parallel Imports ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Domestic Law

This chapter focuses on the issue of exhaustion of rights. Article 6 disclaims any intent in the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement to limit the Members’ freedom to regulate the issue of exhaustion of rights with regard to all types of intellectual property rights (IPRs). It declares the admissibility of the international exhaustion of rights, that is, the possibility of legally importing into a country a product protected by intellectual property rights, after the product has been legitimately put on the market in a foreign market. These imports—made by a party without the authorization of the title-holder but equally legal—are generally known as ‘parallel imports’. Moreover, Article 6 of the TRIPS Agreement has left Member countries freedom to incorporate the principle of exhaustion of rights into their domestic law with a national, regional, or international reach. The issue as such cannot be the subject matter of a dispute settlement under the Agreement.

Part III Jurisdiction, Foreign Judgments and Awards, 14 Limitations on Jurisdiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torremans Paul
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Intellectual Property Rights ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Subject

This chapter discusses the limitations of the English courts' jurisdiction under the traditional rules. It first considers three types of limitations: limitations that affect the subject matter of the issue, limitations that affect the kind of relief sought, and limitations relating to persons between whom the issue is joined. It also explains limitations on jurisdiction imposed by certain statutes before addressing jurisdiction in respect of foreign property such as foreign immovables and intellectual property rights. Furthermore, it describes jurisdiction over the parties, focusing on persons who cannot invoke the jurisdiction and those who may claim exemption from the jurisdiction. The chapter concludes with an overview of statutory limitations on jurisdiction.

scholarly journals Intellectual Property Litigation at the Court of Session: A First Empirical Investigation

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-216
Author(s):  
Jane Cornwell
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Research Data ◽  
Civil Justice ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Jurisdictional Competition

Scotland is said to enjoy an economy rich in intellectual property (“IP”), but reported decisions from the Court of Session in IP matters are rare. This article analyses a new dataset of Court of Session IP actions compiled from court records for the period from 2008 to 2014, alongside a survey and interviews conducted among Scottish legal practitioners working in the field of IP. The research provides insights into the Court of Session's IP caseload, parties and their sectors, the subject matter of claims and remedies sought. This article discusses key themes emerging from the research data against the broader context of civil justice reform and jurisdictional competition between the Scottish, English and other courts.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document