Table Of ContentThe Oxford Handbook of Intellectual Property Law
Oxford Handbooks Online
The Oxford Handbook of Intellectual Property Law
The Oxford Handbook of Intellectual Property Law
Edited by Rochelle Dreyfuss and Justine Pila
Print Publication Date: Apr 2018 Subject: Law Online Publication Date: May 2017
(p. iv)
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The Oxford Handbook of Intellectual Property Law
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Preface
Oxford Handbooks Online
Preface
The Oxford Handbook of Intellectual Property Law
Edited by Rochelle Dreyfuss and Justine Pila
Print Publication Date: Apr 2018 Subject: Law Online Publication Date: May 2017
Preface
(p. v)
In our current age, expressive, informational, and technological subject matter are often
described as having increasing importance. The growing emphasis placed by states and
businesses on the recognition and protection of intellectual property (IP) simultaneously
reflects and supports this view. IP regimes–copyright, trademark, patent, and related
rights—are the primary means by which jurisdictions seek to promote and regulate
human expression, information, and technology. By enabling those responsible for the
creation of intellectual products to exclude others from their benefits, these laws aim to
encourage innovation and creativity, and thereby to support solutions to global
environmental and health problems, in addition to promoting freedom of expression,
culture, and democracy. They also seek to stimulate economic growth and competition—
accounting for their centrality to US foreign trade strategies and European Union (EU)
internal market trade and development policies—and they are of enormous importance to
business. According to a 2014 report commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property
Office, for example, in 2011 UK business invested £126.8 billion in knowledge assets,
compared with £88 billion in tangible assets. Of this investment, approximately 50
percent (£63.5 billion) was protected by IP rights, including an estimated 10 percent in
assets protected by patents, 47 percent in assets protected by copyright, 3 percent in
assets protected by registered design rights, 22 percent in assets protected by trade
marks, and 18 percent in assets protected by unregistered design rights.1
In recent decades, these factors have contributed to a substantial and growing interest in
IP across all spheres of industry and social policy, including an interest in its legal
principles, its social and normative foundations, and its place and operation in the
political economy. It is in recognition of and response to this interest that we agreed to
edit the current Handbook. Consistent with the focus of the other volumes in the Oxford
Handbook series, our aim in doing so has been to provide a detailed entrée to the field
suitable for a wide academic, practitioner, and general audience.
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Preface
Editing a comprehensive volume in the field of IP brought certain special challenges. One
was identifying a framework; another was choosing the right contributors. The challenges
of setting an appropriate framework arose largely from the dynamism of IP as a field, due
in turn to the constantly changing landscape in which IP rights exist and operate. Above
all, changes in technology and the political economy, and in the methods by which
knowledge is produced and IP rights are exploited and enforced locally and
internationally, might have made it tempting to focus the Handbook on current trends.
However, and as previously (p. vi) suggested, a central feature of IP law is its
embeddedness in the social, economic, cultural, and political fabric of states and regions.
That embeddedness creates a need to engage fully with its foundational theoretical and
historical components as well. We thus chose to divide the Handbook into four
substantive parts, focused on the social and normative foundations of IP law, its
emergence and development in different jurisdictions and regions, its substantive rules
and principles, and its political economy.
The same factors of IP dynamism and embeddedness made our choice of authors for the
book essential. This was particularly true given that review essays are not as common in
law as in other disciplines, and that in addition to its technical and other complexities,
compounded when one considers its interaction with other legal areas, IP is a field in
which perspectives can vary considerably depending on the lens through which one is
looking, including the specific IP regime and legal system one treats as paradigmatic.
Of course, meeting these and other challenges has ultimately fallen less to us as the
Handbook’s editors than to the individual authors of each of the chapters themselves.
While it is not for us to judge how well they have met the challenges, we hope and trust
that their rich and varied contributions will be enjoyable and instructive to a diverse
readership.
Inevitably for a volume of its size, the Handbook took longer than planned to come to
fruition. As a result, some of our authors have had to wait longer than expected to see
their chapters published, and we are grateful for their patience. Tragically, we lost one of
our authors during the project. Catherine Seville was an outstanding historian and legal
academic, as her chapter on the emergence and development of IP law in Western Europe
reflects, and we are grateful to her father, Adrian Seville, for supporting its posthumous
publication.
Several others have also provided us with invaluable support and assistance, some of
whom we would like to mention by name. Nicole Arzt of NYU managed the not
insignificant feat of keeping us on top of the project administratively; Alex Flach, Imogen
Hill, and the other members of our editorial team at OUP engaged fully with the project
at each of its stages from conception to final production; and Tobias Endrich (Oxford
MJur 2016) helped us to prepare its individual chapters for copyediting. We are very
grateful to each of them.
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