Many countries have responded (or have considered responding) to the COVID pandemic by modifying their intellectual property laws to ensure the availability of vaccines, medicines, diagnostics, and related information. Some have asked the World Trade Organization (WTO) for a waiver to excuse any...

The issue of inadvertent presence in infringement cases is a significant issue in the law of utility patents for plants. Commentators have sggested a variety of possible solutions to this issue. This article describes and defines the inadvertent presence issue and discusses the possible...

Can U.S. patent law help American businesses compete in global markets? In early 2011, President Barack Obama argued that, to obtain economic prosperity, the United States must “out-innovate . . . the rest of the world,” and that patent reform is a “critical dimension[]” of this...

This chapter seeks to illustrate certain trends in international intellectual property by highlighting and considering some of the more popular, important and potentially far-reaching TRIPS-Plus provisions that have recently been negotiated in bilateral and regional trade agreements. Our...

The substantive boundaries of intellectual property rights are shifting rapidly (if not disintegrating) in the face of the demands of the digital environment, the increasing emphasis on “flexibilities” in multilateral treaty obligations to support sustainable development and access to...

In the struggle for supremacy between two diametrically opposed systems to protect Geographical Indications (GIs), the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) gives the decisive push in favour of the trademark system. This has profound implications for generic geographical names, not only for...

In the platform age, copyright-protected contents are primarily disseminated over the internet. This model poses various challenges to the copyright regime that was mainly designed in and for the analog age. One of these challenges is related to the fair balance between the interests of...

Illegal downloading of copyright materials by end-users had its heyday in the early 2000s, with music, television, and film studios desperately searching for a way to curb the tide of sharing. This chapter uses the example of Capitol Records v Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first file-sharing case to...

The World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC) is negotiating a text in anticipation of a Diplomatic Conference to agree on binding obligations for traditional knowledge (TK)....

Debates continue to rage about the propriety of pharmaceutical patents, especially as required by the TRIPS Agreement. In such moral debates, it is important to have a grounding in moral philosophy. This article frames the issue within the writings of Thomas Aquinas, especially his concept of...