Intellectual Property and Private International Law

Intellectual property has traditionally been regulated on a territorial basis. However, the protection and commercial exploitation of intellectual property rights such as patents, trade marks, designs and copyright occurring across borders are now seldom confined to one jurisdiction. This book considers how the introduction of a foreign element inevitably raises potential problems of private international law, ranging from establishing which court has jurisdiction and which is the applicable law to securing the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments.

The Internet has brought a significant increase in the scale of this phenomenon and valuable new chapters have been added to this edition to reflect this. Nationally protected trade marks are now used globally on websites and copyright material is distributed, communicated and copied in a world without borders. Patents have already been licensed on a transnational basis for several decades. All this raises questions of jurisdiction and applicable law. The well-respected and expert author team address such questions as; which court will have jurisdiction to deal with the issues arising from intellectual property rights and their exploitation in an international context? And which national law will the court with jurisdiction apply? Private international law questions increasingly arise and the two disciplines that previously operated in different spheres are increasingly obliged to co-operate.

Although such issues are becoming increasingly important, a dearth of literature exists on the subject. Fawcett and Torremans remedy that neglect and provide a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the topic that will be welcomed by practitioners and scholars alike.

This book is part of the Oxford Monographs in Private International Law series, the aim of which is to publish work of high quality and originality in a number of important areas of private international law. The series is intended for both scholarly and practitioner readers.

James J. Fawcett has taught at the Universities of Bristol, the National University of Singapore and the University of Leicester before joining the University of Nottingham in 1995. He was a Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Leicester. He is the Director of Research at the School of Law, the University of Nottingham. He has also taught at the Hague Academy of International Law, where he was a Director of Studies in 1988 and gave lectures in 1993. His area of expertise is that of private international law, on which he has written numerous books and articles. He is the general editor of the Oxford Series in Private International Law, which has a list of more than twenty titles.



Paul Torremans is Professor of Intellectual Property Law, University of Nottingham. His areas of expertise are Intellectual Property Law and Private International Law. He was a member of the Department of Private International Law of the Faculty of Law of the University of Ghent, Belgium until 2008. He is a member of the Association Litteraire et Artistique Internationale (ALAI) and chairman of its British branch BLACA. He has acted as an expert for the World Intellectual Property Organization, the European Commission.