• Version
• 93 Downloads
• 19.03 MB File Size
• 1 File Count
• April 25, 2016 Create Date
• April 25, 2016 Last Updated

Intellectual Property Rights

There is no doubt that it is audacious to claim to give an
international overview of national intellectual property
systems in order to discern their conception or likely
conception of information and how they regulate the
information products and services market.
The very notion of information is vague and may be
defined narrowly or so widely that it includes a very broad
range of “items”: newspapers and books, software and
expert-systems, data banks and television broadcasts,
patentable techniques -— in that a technique that is divulged
constitutes information for firms present on the market —
and distinctive symbols such as trademarks, in that these
amount to information for the consumer. Not forgetting that
the term information can refer to information about
individual citizens or employees for example. In our context
here, it is clear however that the notion has to be viewed
from a narrower point of view. The information referred to
here is information processed by advanced technology,
transmitted by modern communications systems: electronic
data processing in the widest sense of the term and
telecommunications, electronic press, for example — if one
has to refer to press — but certainly not press in its
traditional hard copy form.
Contrary to first impressions, the notion of intellectual
property is not perfectly defined either, at least not at the
international level. “Propriedad intelectual” in Spanish and
under Spanish law refer solely to the right to literary and
artistic property (copyright and “droit d’auteur”), whereas,
in French law, the equivalent expression, “propriété
intellectuelle” covers the same field of literary and artistic
property but also that of industrial property. In addition it
should be noted that two further definitions of these words
are also possible from the French point of View: the first,
being the narrow definition just referred to, which restricts
the term to what a lawyer of the “continental” school would
classify as property “strictu senso” (“private reservation”),
and the second, a wider definition closer to Anglo-
American practice tending to consider all legal mechanisms
appropriate for providing for “control” of a commercial
asset, whether contractual mechanisms, mechanisms such as
“délits” (offences) under continental laws or torts in
common law 'systems or the mechanisms of ownership as
such.