This chapter examines the history of the copyright/design interface in Italy from the first copyright and design Acts of the Italian state to the implementation of the Design Directive in 2001. The country has known two main periods, one of full cumulation and the second of partial cumulation....

This paper contributes to the question whether technology does increase subjective well-being in a society. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) document the inventiveness of a society and are a legal byproduct of innovations. The impact of these IPRs on subjective well-being are analyzed...

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...

This article examines how the CJEU case law has impacted UK copyright law in two main areas: the concept of work and the originality requirement, which also includes the infringement test as it is in part a reflection of the originality requirement (sections 4 and 5). To map the changes, the...

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,...

This article reviews the national case law and summarises the views of commentators relating to the concept of substantial investment. This the requirement for a database to be protected by the European sui generis right. The discussion shows that the decisions rarely specify what the level of...

One of the questions that this Congress addresses concerns an important relationship between competition law and intellectual property rights, namely the refusal to licence an intellectual property right such as a patent, trade mark, design or copyright and the correlative power of the...