Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights

Providing a comprehensive and systematic commentary on the nature of overlapping Intellectual Property rights and their place in practice, this book is a major contribution to the way that IP is understood. IP rights are mostly studied in isolation, yet in practice each of the legal categories created to protect IP rights will usually only provide partial legal coverage of the broader context in which such rights are actually created, used, and enforced. Consequently, often multiple IP rights may overlap, in whole or in part, with respect to the same underlying subject matter. Some patterns, for instance, in addition to being protected from copying under the design rights regime, may also be distinctive enough to warrant trade mark protection.

Each chapter addresses a discrete pair of IP rights and is written by a specialist in that area. Facilitating an understanding of how and when those rights may be encountered in practice, each chapter is introduced by a hypothetical situation setting out the overlap discussed in the chapter. The conceptual and practical issues arising from this situation are then discussed, providing practitioners with a full understanding of the overlap.

Also included is a valuable summary table setting out the legal position for each set of overlapping rights in jurisdictions across Europe, Central and South America, and Asia, and the differences between them.

Neil Wilkof is a member of the Bressler Group and he serves as special intellectual property counsel to Herzog, Fox & Neeman. He has been recognized by various surveys as a leading practitioner in the field of intellectual property and technology transfer. He has published numerous articles in the intellectual property law field and is on the editorial board of Intellectual Property Law and Practice. He has taught intellectual property law in several universities in the U.S. and Israel. Wilkof is a graduate of the Yale University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois.


Shamnad Basheer is the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) Professor in Intellectual Property law at the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata. After graduating from the National Law School Bangalore, he joined Anand and Anand, a leading intellectual property law firm in New Delhi, where he rose to head the firm's IT and telecommunications law division. He then went on to do postgraduate studies as a Wellcome Trust Scholar at the University of Oxford and transitioned to academia. However he continues to consult with law firms, governments and intergovernmental institutions. In the past, he has been an IBA and an IPBA scholar and has published papers in leading intellectual property law journals. Shamnad was recently nominated as an expert on the IP global advisory council (GAC) of the World Economic Forum (WEF).