LAU44071 Intellectual Property Law

 Learning Outcomes

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

• Appraise and evaluate the social and economic justifications for intellectual property rights.  

• Identify and analyse how intellectual 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 research tools and materials through which they can deepen their knowledge of specific aspects of intellectual property law.

Module Content

Intellectual property law is an increasingly important and wide bundle of rules aimed at fostering and rewarding human creativity and technological innovation and at protecting investments and goodwill in business-related activities. Intellectual property has traditionally encompassed copyright, trademarks and patents. This area of law has grown exponentially in the last few decades through the extension of the scope of existing rights to protect new assets, works and technologies (e.g. trade secrets, Internet domain names, computer programs, biotechnologies) and the creation of new types of rights (e.g. industrial designs, database rights, access rights for digital content). The module examines the social and economic justifications for intellectual 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 intellectual property today. Although the idea of multi-level regulation of patent and copyright laws goes back to the end of the 19^th century, intellectual property rights 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 examines the most important provisions of this and other international intellectual property laws as well as the EU regulations and directives that have harmonized (or in certain cases even unified, as in the case of trademarks and designs) national legal systems such as the Irish one.