Subject Matter of Intellectual Property

This book studies the categories of subject matter protected by the main intellectual property (IP) regimes, including: the work (protected by copyright law), the invention (protected by patent law), the sign (protected by trade mark law) and the design (protected by designs law). The book makes sense of the law as it exists and argues for its clarification along certain lines, taking international law into account. The book focuses on the law's conception of the categories in the abstract and the courts' conception of individual subject matter in practice. In undertaking a close analysis of each category, it shows that when properly conceived the categories are different in their constitutive aspects and that their protection by different property regimes is therefore appropriate. In discussing the basic subject matter of each form of IP protection, the book moves beyond the question 'what is an X?' toconsider also how the courts conceive individual subject matter in their capacity as 'X'. It also considers non-legal theories of the subject matter categories, the challenges faced by IP law in the current technological age, and the appropriate response to these challenges. This is an invaluable guide to a central aspect of IP law, offering clear theoretical insights and practical guidance for academics and practitioners alike.

Résumé
Despite a rich academic literature in the field of intellectual property (IP), there has been little conceptual analysis of the subject matter that IP rights protect, and in reflection of this, little attention paid to the meaning of the terms used to denote those subject matter, including 'invention', 'authorial work', 'trade mark', and 'design'. This book offers such an analysis, the first of its kind, with the aim of furthering understanding of each IP regime andof IP in general. By means of a nominal word:thing definitional exercise, it studies the terms in question with reference to their recent use by IP legal officials in order to offer a conceptual understanding of the objects that they denote. The analysis proceeds in three main stages. At the first stage, the context in which the relevant terms fall to be defined is considered, with a particular focus on the nature, aims, and values of IP rights and systems. At the second stage, a theoretical framework for thinking about the subject matter protectable by IP in general is proposed, and certain focal questions for understanding such subject matter are derived. And finally, at the third stage, officials' use of the legislative termsthat denote the subject matter protectable by IP regimes are considered in detail and the results of that consideration used to answer the focal questions. The result is a definition of each of the terms with reference to the objects that they denote, with a particular focus on the categories andproperties of the subject matter protectable by each IP regime, the methods by which those subject matter are individuated within each regime, the relationship between each subject matter and its concrete instances, and the manner in which each subject matter and its instances is known.