The Invention and Plant Variety

Author(s):  
Justine Pila

This chapter seeks to define the terms ‘invention’ and ‘plant variety’ as used by European and UK legal officials particularly. To that end, the nature of the objects identified by the legislature and courts as inventions and plant varieties is considered, as well as the nature of the objects excluded from protection, whether with reference to the requirement for an invention or plant variety or on other statutory grounds. The chapter also considers the law governing patent and plant variety right entitlement, and its implications for legal conceptions of the invention and plant variety. In its conclusion, the legal understandings of inventions and plant varieties 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 the existence of each individual subject matter and its tokens.

Author(s):  
Justine Pila

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.


Author(s):  
Justine Pila

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.


Author(s):  
Justine Pila

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.


2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Halpin

Allan Hutchinson’s recent book, The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized, is regarded as presenting the opportunity for considering what is involved in seeking to establish the province of jurisprudence as a distinctive field of inquiry. The scale of Hutchinson’s ambition matches John Austin’s original efforts to determine the Province of Jurisprudence, but seeks to replace an analytical approach to jurisprudence he associates with Austin by a theoretical approach committed to advancing “strong” democracy. This provokes an initial reflection on the nature of theoretical disageement, and in particular disagreement which goes beyond trivial theoretical contestability so as to contest the nature of the subject matter that is being investigated by establishing an appropriate field of inquiry for it. Three different techniques are introduced which are capable of demarcating the subject matter of jurisprudence through establishing a field of inquiry favouring a particular theoretical viewpoint: axiomatic disengagement, ambitious insight, and a split field of inquiry.Hutchinson’s principal concern with the democratization of law, legal theory, and the province of jurisprudence is examined in detail. The process of democratization and its anti-elitist character is traced through Hutchinson’s opposition to the aloof philosophical analysis of the universal in favour of an engagement with local and particular issues. However, the weight Hutchinson places on his conception of strong democracy, so as to provide a different understanding of the the law-power nexus and of the relationship between law and morality operating in strong democracies, is shown to be misplaced. Two related failings are pointed out. First, there is a failure to recognize competing groupings within the people, which contradict the uniform collective body Hutchinson associates with those formerly governed by elites and then constituting those liberated to exercise self-governance. Secondly, this links into Hutchinson’s exclusive preoccupation with the participatory axis of democracy – which he regards as the core feature of strong democracy, and at the same time the basis for the law-power nexus and the law-morality relationship within a strong democracy. This is revealed as an inadequate and impoverished understanding of democracy once the presence of competing groupings within the people is acknowledged. Hutchinson’s one-dimensional representation of democracy along a participatory-representational continuum is rejected for failing to recognize a distinct fiduciary-beneficiary axis, which a richer understanding of “for the people” conveys. These corrections have important consequences for a role for law that cannot be reduced solely to politics, and for a broader sweep to analytical jurisprudence than Hutchinson allows.Hutchinson’s own efforts to capture the province of jurisprudence are then assessed. These are recharacterized as seeking to establish within a split field of inquiry a theory of strong democratic law, but, in the absence of a convincing account of the nature of democracy and its relationship with law, the project is judged to be unfulfilled.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-234
Author(s):  
Marcelo de Araujo ◽  
Clara Savelli

The aim of this article is to explore a relationship that has not yet been examined in the contemporary debate on law and literature. The law can, indeed, constitute the subject matter of a novel. But as we argue in this article, the law can also determine what counts, and what does not count as a novel. We defend this thesis by analyzing Ian McEwan’s “The Children Act” (2014) and David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King” (2011). In the context of contemporary cultural production, the law has the power and the legitimacy to create what we call the space of fiction. As we intend to show, the law can create the demarcation line between fictional and non-fictional narratives.


Author(s):  
Gerhard Preyer

The study of meaning in language embraces a diverse range of problems and methods. Philosophers think through the relationship between language and the world; linguists document speakers’ knowledge of meaning; psychologists investigate the mechanisms of understanding and production. Up through the early 2000s, these investigations were generally compartmentalized: indeed, researchers often regarded both the subject matter and the methods of other disciplines with skepticism. Since then, however, there has been a sea change in the field, enabling researchers increasingly to synthesize the perspectives of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology and to energize all the fields with rich new intellectual perspectives that facilitate meaningful interchange. One illustration of the trend is the publication of Lepore and Stone’s ...


2006 ◽  
Vol 258-260 ◽  
pp. 52-58
Author(s):  
Y.C. Chen

Traditional theories of interdiffusion in solids based on Fick’s first and second laws and Darken’s equations can not describe the relationship between the diffusion fluxes and the diffusion-induced stresses, because the subject matter of the traditional theories is the diffusing atom or atomic flux, not the volume unit within the interdiffusion field. For this reason, it is suggested that the concept of flow point in the interdiffusion field should be constructed to describe the diffusion-induced stresses and the phase growth.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jozef Valuch ◽  
Tomáš Gábriš ◽  
Ondrej Hamuľák

Abstract The aim of this paper is to evaluate and differentiate between the phenomena of cyberwarfare and information warfare, as manifestations of what we perceive as postmodern warfare. We describe and analyse the current examples of the use the postmodern warfare and the reactions of states and international bodies to these phenomena. The subject matter of this paper is the relationship between new types of postmodern conflicts and the law of armed conflicts (law of war). Based on ICJ case law, it is clear that under current legal rules of international law of war, cyber attacks as well as information attacks (often performed in the cyberspace as well) can only be perceived as “war” if executed in addition to classical kinetic warfare, which is often not the case. In most cases perceived “only” as a non-linear warfare (postmodern conflict), this practice nevertheless must be condemned as conduct contrary to the principles of international law and (possibly) a crime under national laws, unless this type of conduct will be recognized by the international community as a “war” proper, in its new, postmodern sense.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Riet Eeckhout

This article looks at ways in which architecture can be articulated as a sensation within the drawing. The subject of occupying drawings is considered here as a result of entering the drawing, an action John Hejduk describes ‘as a flight of no substance’, collapsing space between the observer and the artefact in its wake. Entering the drawing and subsequently occupying the drawing is considered here as a phenomenon that enables experiential and observational proximity to an artefact and its embedded subject. The collapsing mechanism enforces thinking about the observational intent of this type of entering, its relationship with immediacy and with aspects of the non-representational. Furthermore, the act of entering the drawing is viewed as a technique for mediating and bringing forth subject matter in the drawing. This technique of augmented observation and mediation is in service of the quest for subject presence in the drawing, as opposed to subject representation in the drawing – allowing a residence in close encounter by the maker during production and later by the observer of the resulting artefact. The article is accompanied by a set of drawings from the Drawing Out Gehry series. The drawings are driven by an interest in relational encounters and space they take in. Away from an object or component-directed perception of space and towards the understanding of space as the relationship between elements, this set of drawings is in search of the quality and intrigue raised by the architectural event as the encounter of spatial circumstances.


Author(s):  
Gökhan Kodalak

There is a peculiar aesthetic undercurrent traversing Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy, harbouring untapped potentials and far-reaching consequences for contemporary discussions on aesthetics. The relationship between aesthetics and Spinoza’s philosophy, however, has been nothing but a huge missed encounter, resulting in the publication of only a few books and a handful of articles throughout a vast period of more than three-and-a-half centuries. Which begs the question: might there be, despite our persistent negligence, much more to the relationship of Spinoza and aesthetics than first meets the eye? I will argue that there might be. For once Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole, ranging from his philosophical and political treatises to his private letters and unfinished manuscripts, is read between the lines, latent seeds of a peculiar aesthetic theory become visible—an aesthetic theory that moves beyond subjective and objective approaches that have come to dominate the field, and rather grounds itself on affective interactions and morphogenetic processes. A subterranean journey through Spinoza’s affective aesthetics constitutes the subject matter of this paper, which interweaves subtle aesthetic hints buried deep within his philosophical archive, while unfolding relevant ramifications of these promising discoveries for the current aesthetic discourse.


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