Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual Property (IP) is a set of economic and moral rights (IPRs) concerning intangible creations of the human intellect. It includes patents on inventions, copyright on artistic work, such as music and literature (but also software), trademarks on goods and services, trade secrets on product formulas on production processes, as well as more specific rights attached to traditional knowledge (mostly in the form of geographical indications) or plant varieties (rights for breeders and farmers).

IPRs are nowadays a major economic resource for a variety of organizations, ranging from pharmaceutical and hi-tech multinationals engaged in global trade, agricultural consortia resisting the commodification of their products, media companies selling their contents through the internet, and software companies licensing their applications for computers, mobiles and connected objects.

The course will provide students with a basic understanding of the economic and legal principles underlying IP legislation and enforcement (not just through theory, but also history) and to introduce them to the debate on the global extension of both. Both descriptive statistics and case studies will be used to stress the relevance of the topic, which may otherwise sound too technical for some students.