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A preprint of this article is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1927628

The TRIPS Agreement (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), signed on April 15, 1994, introduced intellectual property protection into the World Trade Organization's multilateral trading system, and it remains the most comprehensive international agreement on intellectual property to date. A Neofederalist Vision of TRIPS by Graeme B. Dinwoodie and Rochelle C. Dreyfuss examines its interpretation, its impact on the creative environment, and its effect on national and international lawmaking. It propounds a vision of TRIPS as creating a neofederalist regime, one that will ensure the resilience of the international intellectual property system in time of rapid change. In this vision, WTO members retain considerable flexibility to tailor intellectual property law to their national priorities and to experiment with changes necessary to meet new technological and social challenges, but agree to operate within an international framework. This framework, while less powerful than the central administration of a federal government, comprises a series of substantive and procedural commitments that promote the coordination of both the present intellectual property system as well as future international intellectual property lawmaking. Part I demonstrates the centrality of state autonomy throughout the history of international negotiations over intellectual property. Part II, which looks at the present, analyzes the decisions of the WTO in intellectual property cases. It concludes that the WTO has been inattentive to the benefits of promoting cultural diversity, the values inherent in intellectual property, the rich fabric of its law and lore, the necessary balance between producers and users of knowledge goods, and the relationship between the law and the technological environment in which it must operate. Looking to the future, Part III develops a framework for integrating the increasingly fragmented international system and proposes the recognition of an international intellectual property acquis, a set of longstanding principles that have informed, and should continue to inform intellectual property lawmaking. The acquis would include both express and latent components of the international regime, put access-regarding guarantees such as user rights on a par with proprietary interests and enshrine the fundamental importance of national autonomy in the international system.

ISBN: ISBN13: 978019530461

A preprint of this article is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=982419

A preprint of this article is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1160191

A preprint of this article is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1355524

A preprint of this article is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1160176

For many years there was doubt as to whether personal property could be abandoned. In more recent times, however, the existence of a doctrine of abandonment has been solidifying in relation to chattels. In this article the authors suggest that copyright works can also be abandoned. This conclusion has significant implications for cultural institutions and other users struggling to deal with so-called ‘orphaned works’. More generally, the authors suggest that recognising that abandonment of copyright is possible has repercussions for how we think about intellectual property rights and, in particular, should cause us to look more closely at other doctrines within the law of personal property that might limit intellectual property’s reach.

Although intellectual property law is a relatively recent legal innovation, it has from an early stage in its development possessed an international dimension. As far back as the late nineteenth century, this resulted in the adoption of a group of multinational treaties that remain the foundation of what can be called the public international law of intellectual property. Efforts to develop a private international law of intellectual property are much more recent, and are ongoing in a number of different institutional settings. Yet, the need for attention to this field remains acute. This Article explores the content of a private international law of intellectual property. It does not seek to articulate a comprehensive scheme. Rather, this exploration is intended to facilitate consideration of the core principle of territoriality that informs so much of the existing regime. The Article sketches the basic principles of private international law that apply in transborder intellectual property disputes, examining treaty provisions and developments at the national and regional level. Some of the leading questions are highlighted by discussion of six recent transborder intellectual property disputes. These disputes help to illustrate aspects of cross-border exploitation of intellectual property that need to be taken into account both in critiquing current approaches and in formulating alternatives. The Article then turns to focus on the concept of territoriality. Territoriality is a principle that has always received excessive doctrinal purchase in intellectual property law. Moreover, the normative force of the principle has declined as units of social and commercial organization have come to correspond less neatly with national borders, and as private ordering has weakened the capacity (and perhaps the claim) of the nation-state exclusively to determine the behavior of its citizenry. Finally, many of the same values (for example, diversity of legal regimes, tailoring of intellectual property to local needs, and protecting rights on an international basis) that the public international intellectual property system sought to further through its promulgation of the principle of territoriality can now best (and perhaps only) be achieved by reconfiguring the principle. This Article approaches the task of reconfiguration in two ways. First, it explores some of the different ways in which the principle of territoriality might conceptually inform a private international law of intellectual property. Contemporary multi-territorial intellectual property disputes are characterized by an excess of shared but weaker prescriptive and adjudicatory authority. The Article suggests a restrained concept of territoriality that reflects that reality, drawing in particular from the treatment of extra-territoriality in trademark law. The Article also approaches the question less conceptually and proposes liberalization of a specific principle of private international intellectual property law: limits on consolidated adjudication of infringement claims under domestic and foreign intellectual property laws.

ISBN: 0043-5589

This response to Barton Beebe explores whether contemporary experience in Europe supports the central arguments advanced by Beebe in The Supressed Misappropriation Origins of Trademark Antidilution Law. The development of E.U. law is largely consistent with the idea that dilution law is in part an effort to install a misappropriation regime, at least insofar as the objects of protection are trademarks with a reputation (increasingly, a smaller caveat as the scope of potential trademark subject matter expands and the reputation threshold falls). This has important local consequences: if dilution law is in truth is a law against misappropriation, the Court of Justice of the European Union has greater scope to contribute to the creation of a nascent European law of unfair competition. But examining recent European case law also suggests that understanding misappropriation as part of a broader system of unfair competition may moderate the formalist critique of misappropriation as wholly indeterminate and unlimited. Understood in its unfair competition milieu, a misappropriation-based concept of dilution retains some potential for measured delineation of the edges of protection.

Trademark law contains important limits that place a range of third party conduct beyond the control of the trademark owner. However, I suggest that trademark law would be better served if several of its limits were explicitly conceptualized as defenses to an action for infringement, that is, as rules permitting unauthorized uses of marks even where such uses implicate the affirmative concerns of trademark law and thus support a prima facie cause of action by the trademark owner. To explore why this distinction between limits and defenses matters, I discuss the different nature of the proscription imposed by copyright and trademark law. And I draw lessons both from case law deriving limits from interpretation of the proscription of trademark law as well as from the development of statutory defenses to dilution. Conceiving of limits as defenses would help ensure that the (often unstated) values underlying socially desirable third party uses are not too readily disregarded if they happen to conflict with confusion-avoidance concerns that are historically powerful drivers of trademark protection. Such an approach would also ameliorate the uncertainties caused by the acceptance of extended (and increasingly amorphous) notions of actionable harm in trademark law. And it would facilitate a more transparent debate about the different forms that limits on trademark rights might take. Some defenses will operate as mechanisms by which to balance competing policy concerns on a case-by-case basis, while others (reflecting more fundamental normative commitments, or driven by more proceduralist concerns) might allow certain values categorically to trump the basic policy concerns supporting liability for trademark infringement. Full development of these defenses will involve courts adopting a conscious understanding of the different jurisprudential nature of defenses and will be made easier by acceptance of the Lanham Act as a delegating statute.

ISBN: 1557-6582

In 1879, the United States Supreme Court recognized that trade marks are a creature of the common law. Likewise, the English courts had long recognized causes of action that effectively protected marks prior to the enactment of statutes delineating the scope of trademark protection. The characterization of trade mark law as a field of common law may, however, now seem an essentially historical statement. In the United States, the early twentieth century saw the adoption of a series of federal trademark registration statutes, and in 1946 Congress enacted even more comprehensive trademark legislation, namely the Lanham Act. Since then, Congress, has episodically - but with increasing frequency - revised the trademark statute. In light of such increased statutorification of trade mark law, what is the continued role of the common law in developing appropriate protection for trade marks? In this chapter, I recount the development of the common law of trade marks, highlighting the background developments outside trademark law that influenced the allocation of trademark lawmaking authority over the course of the twentieth century. The historical importance of these external influences suggests that trademark law will not be immune to changes in contemporary judicial philosophy that have made some scholars fearful about the room for further common law development. However, a brief review of recent Congressional activity and Supreme Court opinions in the field suggests that, despite substantial legislative intervention, both Congress and the Supreme Court appear content that the development of trademark and unfair competition law in the United States remain a partnership between the two institutions, and thus heavily dependent on common law lawmaking by the courts.

ISBN: 9781841139708

In recent years, intellectual property law has paid increasing attention to issues of private international law. The American Law Institute promulgated Intellectual Property: Principles Governing Jurisdiction, Choice of Law, and Judgments in Transnational Dispute in 2008. In Europe, the Max Planck Institutes’ Conflict of Laws in Intellectual Property Conflicts of Law effort is expected in 2010. However, neither of these projects has dealt explicitly with choice of law on contributory liability (or any other form of secondary liability that makes one party liable for the harm caused by another). Yet, actions premised on secondary liability are rapidly becoming the favored route for efficient enforcement on a worldwide basis. Examples include cases that attempt to impose liability on manufacturers of copying technologies for infringements caused by those who use their equipment; on purveyors of peer-to-peer file sharing software for the activities of those who download material without rightholders’ permissions; on internet service providers for subscribers’s infringing postings; and on other intermediaries, such as auction sites. In principle, secondary liability actions can occur in all areas of intellectual property law. However, for purposes of this paper, we concentrate on trademark cases, such as the litigation involving the responsibility of the online auction house, e-Bay, for the sale of counterfeit goods on its website. The problems posed in that area are particularly complex. After offering a stylized fact pattern to illustrate the problems, we consider the different ways in which courts might deal with questions arising in cases where secondary liability claims are asserted. We suggest that the traditional approach to choice of law in trademark cases generates unacceptable uncertainties for intermediaries and that a genuine engagement with conflicts scholarship would help mediate among the diverse interests and policy concerns. In the end, however, we conclude that private international law solutions may not resolve all the complications of multinational secondary liability cases. Thus, we are moved to propose, as an alternative solution, an autonomous (substantive) principle applicable in these cases. We conclude with some thoughts about how the different approaches engage with existing models for the resolution of trans-border intellectual property disputes and with the international intellectual property regime more generally.

ISBN: 0028-7873

Introduction available at http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199296941.do and http://ssrn.com/abstract=1499578.

ISBN: 978-0-19-929694-1