Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights

While intellectual property rights are mostly studied in isolation, in practice the legal categories created to protect these rights provide only partial legal coverage of the broader context in which such rights are created, used, and enforced. Consequently, often multiple IP rights overlap with respect to the same underlying subject matter.

This book enables readers to consider how these overlapping rights work together, facilitating a deeper understanding of how and when they may be encountered in practice. Each chapter addresses a discrete pair of IP rights and uses a hypothetical scenario to analyse particular conceptual and practical issues, giving practitioners a comprehensive understanding of the overlap.

While the focus of these IP rights is on UK, US and European law, the book also contains comparison tables of overlapping IP rights in other countries around the world. These tables complement the chapters, offering a detailed overview as to how these overlaps apply in different legal jurisdictions, as well as how they differ.