Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights

While intellectual property rights are mostly studied in isolation, in practice the legal categories created to protect these rights provide only partial legal coverage of the broader context in which such rights are created, used, and enforced. Consequently, often multiple IP rights overlap with respect to the same underlying subject matter.

This book enables readers to consider how these overlapping rights work together, facilitating a deeper understanding of how and when they may be encountered in practice. Each chapter addresses a discrete pair of IP rights and uses a hypothetical scenario to analyse particular conceptual and practical issues, giving practitioners a comprehensive understanding of the overlap.

While the focus of these IP rights is on UK, US and European law, the book also contains comparison tables of overlapping IP rights in other countries around the world. These tables complement the chapters, offering a detailed overview as to how these overlaps apply in different legal jurisdictions, as well as how they differ.

Neil Wilkof, Dr. Eyal Bressler & Co, Shamnad Basheer, Professor, Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access to Legal Education (IDIA), Irene Calboli, Texas A&M School of Law

Neil Wilkof served for over 20 years as an adjunct lecturer in intellectual property law in various institutions in the United States, Israel, and India. He has published widely in academic and professional publications, and has lectured extensively in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He has been a member of the IPKat blog team for nearly 15 years. Mr. Wilkof served as a partner and head of the IP department in Israel's largest law firm. He is magna cum laude graduate of Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois.

Shamnad Basheer was co-editor of the first edition of this book, and he was engaged in preparing the second edition at the time of his tragic death in August 2019. Shamnad graduated with Honors from the National Law School of India Bangalore. He worked in the private sector, practicing IP law in Delhi. He earned a BCL with Distinction, and in turn an MPhil and DPhil in law at Oxford.

Shamnad taught at George Washington University in Washington, DC, then moved to the National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata as the Ministry of HRD Chaired Professor of Intellectual Property. He had been a guest lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. Shamnad was also Founder of the IDIA Charitable Trust.

In 2018, Shamnad was recognized by Obelisk Support as one of the top ten lawyers who are changing the world for the better. Also in 2018, Shamnad received the Pirappancode Memorial Award for 'outstanding social justice lawyering'.

Irene Calboli is Professor of Law at Texas A&M University School of Law, Academic Fellow at the School of Law, University of Geneva, Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, and Transatlantic Technology Law Fellow at Stanford University. In 2022, she was Fulbright-Hanken Distinguished Chair in Law and Economics in Finland. Her recent books include the Handbook of Intellectual Property Research (OUP, 2021), and The Protection of Non Traditional Trademarks: Critical Perspectives (OUP, 2018). Irene is a member of the Editorial Board of the Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property, the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice (OUP), and the WIPO-WTO Colloquium Papers.