LAU44271 Industrial Property Law

 Learning Outcomes

By the end of this module, students should be able to: 

• Appraise and evaluate the social and economic justifications for industrial property rights. 
• Identify and analyse how industrial property rights are protected and commercially exploited, in both offline and online environments. 
• Demonstrate an understanding of the implications of international conventions and the most important EU legislative measures, from both a trade-related and non-market perspective. 
• Evaluate Ireland’s obligations in this field. 
• Identify legal issues in complex cases and argue either side of the arguments raised by the parties involved.
• Demonstrate familiarity with the research tools and the materials through which they can deepen their knowledge of specific aspects of industrial property law.

Module Content

Industrial property law is an increasingly important and wide bundle of rules aimed at fostering and rewarding technological innovation and at protecting investments, fair competition, and goodwill in all business-related activities. This area of law has traditionally encompassed trademarks and patents, going through a process of exponential growth in the last few decades. On the one hand, the scope of existing rights has been extended to protect new assets and technologies such as trade secrecy, Internet domain names, and biotechnologies. On the other hand, protection started being granted on characteristics of products (such as three-dimensional shapes or smells) whose potential privatization raises serious issues for competition and the public interest. The module examines the social and economic justifications for industrial property rights as well as their multi-layered regulation.  

The module draws upon a selection of domestic intellectual property regimes to show the impact of international and European law and decision-making on EU Member States and to critically evaluate some of the policies and goals that underlie today’s industrial property. Although the idea of multi-level regulation of patent and copyright laws goes back to the end of the 19th century, trademarks, patents and their enforcement have been globalised more effectively since the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1994 and the related adoption of an international agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (known as the ‘TRIPS’ Agreement). The module provides an in-depth examination of the most important provisions of this Agreement and of other international industrial property conventions as well as EU regulations and directives that sought to harmonize (or in certain cases even unify, as in the case of trademarks) national legal systems such as the Irish one. 

Teaching Methods Module learning activities 

Classes will consist of three 1-hour lectures per week for a total of 18 hours. Classes will be designed to foster interactivity among students, ensuring an ongoing dialogue between the instructor and the whole class. The instructor will encourage a collective, critical review of the module materials also via class contributions students can make by publishing (ungraded) posts, questions, and comments on Blackboard’s Discussion Board.