Unfair Competition Law: The Protection of Intellectual and Industrial Creativity

This work gives an overview of the current state of the law of unfair competition for the protection of the intellectual creations and industrial assets in the EU, the USA and other major Anglo-American jurisdictions. Despite the growing interest in this area of law in recent years, little attention has been given to the varying legal and economic paradigms that underlie and shape it. This need for a comparative, theoretical examination is heightened by the advent of the information age, coupled with the desire to integrate markets. These developments pose a challenge to the current regimes of intellectual property protection since these are increasingly becoming out of step with the paradigms that shaped the traditional patent, copyright and trademark regimes. In this work, the author explores the alternative to a protective regime based on unfair competition doctrines, and examines the themes of economic justification, shaping legal boundaries, finding a legal justification, practical application, and harmonization of national laws.