Comments on the European Court of Justice ruling in IMS Health GmbH & Co OHG v NDC Health GmbH & Co KG (C-418/01) on whether a database maker committed an abuse of dominant position under the EC Treaty Art.82 by refusing to grant a copyright licence to allow a rival company to use a brick...

This article deals with the contractual protection of databases which are publicly made available by their producers. The article reviews this issue in the European Union and the United States. It is useful to analyse database protection in this manner, especially in the United States where the...

When the database sui generis right (database right) was enacted in 1996, many voices rose to criticise it vehemently. According to some, it would create an unprecedented intellectual property right on information, the latter being traditionally otherwise free, that would lead to monopolies on...

Could intellectual property rights be the cause of global warming? After all, the greatest inventions of the two last centuries include the car, the plane and with them the use of oil and coal to generate energy. They are some of the causes that contribute the most to the increase of levels of...

Intellectual property rights are exclusive rights the law gives to authors and inventors to stimulate creativity and innovation. Intellectual property laws’ justification assumes that the more creations and inventions there are, the better off the population is. Therefore, the law promotes...

2014 was the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web (WWW) and as of 30 June 2014, 3,035,749,340 (ie around 3 billion and 35 million) people were connected to the Internet so a bit more than half the population of the planet. There were around 1.70 billion active smart phones in the world at the end...

Community Registered Design Rights (CRDRS) will no longer extend to the UK post-Brexit; national legislation will need to be enacted to give rights in the UK to CRDR owners. The registration process will also be affected.Contracts referring to the EU or EEA may need to be amended and parties may...

This paper attempts to determine the most adequate rules to regulate the interface between copyright and design protection. The main standard to determine such rules is avoiding both under- and over-protection. To achieve such balanced protection, criteria to regulate the interface used in...

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....

As hundreds of zettabytes of data are being generated by the bio-cyber-physical technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), it has become untenable to argue that the law needs to introduce incentives to produce more data. Instead, as private corporations amass a wealth of data...