Applicants in Europe are left with few options for the patent protection of hES cell-related technology.

European Intellectual Property Law offers a full account of the nature, context, and effect of European IP law. The amount and reach of European law- and decision-making in the field of intellectual property has grown exponentially since the 1960s, making it increasingly difficult to treat European IP regimes as mere adjuncts to domestic and international regimes. European Intellectual Property Law responds to this reality by presenting a clear and detailed account of each of the main European IP systems, including the areas of substantive IP law on which they are based. The result is a full account of the European intellectual property field, presented in the context of both the EU legal system and international IP law, including EU constitutional law, the law of the European Patent Convention 1973/2000, and private international law. By drawing selectively on examples from domestic IP regimes, the text also illustrates substantive differences between those regimes and demonstrates the impact of European law and decision-making on EU Member States. The result is a modern treatment of European IP law that goes beyond a discussion of the provisions of individual legal instruments to consider their wider context and effect.

No abstract

No abstract

Abstract:The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) We have collected two data sets relating to all ECJ copyright and database cases up to Svensson (February 2014): (1) Statistics about the allocation of cases to chambers, the composition of chambers, the Judge Rapporteur, and Advocate General (including coding of the professional background of the personnel); (2) Content analysis of argumentative patterns in the decisions themselves, using a qualitative coding technique. Studying the relationship between (1) and (2) allows us to identify links between certain Chambers/ Court members and legal approaches, over time, and by subject. These shed light on the internal workings of the court, and also enable us to explore theories about the nature of ECJ jurisprudence.The analysis shows that private law and in particular intellectual property law expertise is almost entirely missing from the Court. However, we find that the Court has developed a mechanism for enabling judicial learning through the systematic assignment of cases to certain Judges and AGs. We also find that the Court has developed a "fair balance" topos linked to Judge Malenovský (rapporteur on 24 out of 40 copyright cases) that does not predict an agenda of upward harmonisation, with about half of judgments narrowing rather than widening the scope of copyright protection.