Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights

With this publication, WIPO and the author aim at making available for judges, lawyers and law enforcement officials a valuable tool for the handling of intellectual property cases. To that effect, the case book uses carefully selected court decisions drawn from various countries with either civil or common law traditions. The extracts from the decisions and accompanying comments illustrate the different areas of intellectual property law, with an emphasis on matters that typically arise in connection with the enforcement of intellectual property rights in civil as well as criminal proceedings.

What do you do if … you need to seek a court order against a former employee who has set up in competition with you, having first helped themselves to your customer database? … Or if you are deluged with complainants who have bought products they thought were yours, but turn out to have been made from inferior materials and without your knowledge or consent? … Or if you receive a solicitor's letter complaining that a product you are about to launch infringes their client's trade mark or registered design? Jane Lambert's concise and practical guide gives you the knowledge that you need to make crucial decisions to protect your intellectual assets before it is too late. It should be kept close at hand for use in emergencies, just like a first aid manual. Its purpose is to alert you to problems so that you can take the right steps to manage them, in consultation with your professional advisors, before they develop into crises. And, if the worst does happen and you need to go to law, the guide provides you with the information you need to understand the process, the risks and how to prepare effectively. If you are planning an enforcement strategy, looking for the optimum patent or registered trade mark or design protection and to secure the appropriate insurance to make sure you have a fund available to enforce these, then this book is for you. If you're already in hot water, someone with an intellectual property problem who needs to make fast decisions in very little time, then this book is for you too. It could help you avoid the most expensive mistake of your life.

Written at the request of the Enforcement and Special Projects Division of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) by Louis Harms, judge at the Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa, this work aims at becoming a valuable tool for the handling of intellectual property cases in common law countries, particularly where precedent in this domain is rare.

Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in the EU Member States provides a timely overview and thorough analysis of intellectual property rights enforcement in the EU Member States. Taking legal action in one or several countries in the EU to enforce intellectual property rights is quite a challenge. The adoption of European Directive 2004/48/EC on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights was meant to put a halt to considerable discrepancies in national legislations which caused uncertainty and a difference in enforcement between the EU Member States. The Enforcement Directive aimed to create a level playing field and to ensure a high, equivalent and homogeneous level of intellectual property protection across the EU.Over the past decade, the Enforcement Directive has been transposed into all EU Member States, in national legislation and through its application in national and EU case law. Both are essential to understand the Enforcement Directive's actual scope of application. In order to prepare and undertake an action in different countries potentially simultaneously knowledge of national legislation, local custom and practice, as well as procedural law, national and EU case law is essential.This book is a collaborative effort of lawyers from top tier firms from all 28 EU Member States. It is a valuable resource for both practitioners who are active cross-border and internationally and general counsel who seek an in-depth analysis of the legal landscape across the EU.

In The Global Regime for the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, Xavier Seuba offers a comprehensive description of the international norms and bodies dealing with the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The book analyzes multilateral, plurilateral, and bilateral treaties, and their national implementation, along with civil, border, and criminal enforcement. The book also explores the interface between the enforcement of intellectual property rights and the norms regulating international trade, competition, and human rights, as well as the conceptual and systemic aspects of enforcement, while illustrating the importance of these rights with examples in litigation. The book should be read by anyone interested in how intellectual property rights are being enforced around the world, and how these efforts relate to other legal regimes.

19. Counterfeiting and the music industry: towards a criminalization of end users? The French 'HADOPI' exampleIndex.

Providing a comprehensive and systematic commentary on the nature of overlapping Intellectual Property rights and their place in practice, this book is a major contribution to the way that IP is understood. IP rights are mostly studied in isolation, yet in practice each of the legal categories created to protect IP rights will usually only provide partial legal coverage of the broader context in which such rights are actually created, used, and enforced. Consequently, often multiple IP rights may overlap, in whole or in part, with respect to the same underlying subject matter. Some patterns, for instance, in addition to being protected from copying under the design rights regime, may also be distinctive enough to warrant trade mark protection. Each chapter addresses a discrete pair of IP rights and is written by a specialist in that area. Facilitating an understanding of how and when those rights may be encountered in practice, each chapter is introduced by a hypothetical situation setting out the overlap discussed in the chapter. The conceptual and practical issues arising from this situation are then discussed, providing practitioners with a full understanding of the overlap. Also included is a valuable summary table setting out the legal position for each set of overlapping rights in jurisdictions across Europe, Central and South America, and Asia, and the differences between them.