OUP publish Dr Justine Pila’s new monograph, The Subject Matter of Intellectual Property

Despite a rich academic literature in the field of IP, there has been little conceptual analysis of the subject matter that IP rights protect and, in reflection of this, little attention paid to the meaning of the terms used to denote those subject matter.

Pila’s book offers such an analysis, the first of its kind, with the aim of furthering understanding of each IP regime and of IP in general. By means of a nominal word: thing definitional exercise, and with the assistance of certain focal questions derived from theory, it studies the terms in question with reference to their recent use by IP legal officials in order to offer a conceptual understanding of the objects that they denote. The result is a definition of each term with reference to those objects, with a particular focus on the categories and properties of the subject matter protectable by each IP regime, the methods by which those subject matter are individuated within each regime, the relationship between each subject matter and its concrete instances, and the manner in which each subject matter and its instances is known. 

More information about the book is available on OUP’s website