The Design Directive and Design Regulation (‘EU design law') are now almost 20 years old. The Max Planck Institute's drafted a proposal for an EU design law. The European Commission's proposal for a legal protection of designs was close to the Max Planck draft in most part and the said draft...

The dominant justification for intellectual property rights at least in the West and international treaties is utilitarian, and more precisely based on the Chicago School of Law and Economics (first section). However, this school of thought is both flawed and ideological (second section). Basing...

The Chicago School of the law and economics movement, on which the predominant justification for independent property rights is based in most countries, is flawed mainly because it takes economic wealth as the sole proxy for well-being. We suggest replacing it with a well-being approach, which,...

Reviews the database directive 96/9/EC, including the EU and national case law and its relationship with contract, unfair competition law, trade secrets, TPMs and their legal protection (ACPs), the directive on the re-use of public sector information and machine-generated data (inc. the EC Data...

The Database Directive, which created a new database sui generis right and harmonized the copyright provisions for databases, does not exclude quot;state databasesquot; from protection. The question is whether the state should benefit from such intellectual property protection. De lege ferenda,...