The Protection of Biodiversity and Traditional Knowledge in International Law of Intellectual Property

By Jonathan Curci

Book Overview

As its economic potential has expanded rapidly, intellectual property has become a subject of front-rank legal importance. Cambridge Intellectual Property and Information Law is a series of monograph studies of major current issues in intellectual property. Each volume contains a mix of international, European, comparative and national law, making this a highly significant series for practitioners, judges and academic researchers in many countries. International intellectual property treaties, the United Nations international environmental treaties (first and foremost the Convention on Biological Diversity), the relevant customary norms, and soft law form a complex network of obligations that sometimes conflict with each other. The first set of treaties creates private rights while the latter affirms the sovereignty rights of states over genetic resources and related knowledge and create international regimes of exploitation of the same. Jonathan Curci proposes solutions to the conflicts between treaties through the concept of "mutual supportiveness," including the construction of a national access- and benefit-sharing regime; mandatory contractual provisions in relevant international contracts; a defensive protection when genetic-resource-related traditional knowledge is unjustly patented, through the analysis of the concepts of "ordre public and morality"; "certificate of origin" in the patent application; and "novelty-destroying prior art" and positive protection through existing and sui generis intellectual property rights and misappropriation regimes. Book jacket.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521199441
• ISBN13: 9780521199445
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"