L’étude fait un bilan de l’étendue de la protection de l’objet du brevet et de la sécurité juridique. Elle s’appuie sur la législation et les décisions brésiliennes et européennes. L’étude aborde dans un premier temps la détermination de l’objet du brevet lors de sa rédaction: la description est analysée du point de vue de la forme, puis de celui du fond. Ensuite, la revendication est analysée du point de vue de ses structures et de ses conditions de fond.La notion de moyen est définie. Le rôle de la description et de la revendication dans la détermination de l’objet du brevet étant défini, la deuxième partie de l’étude est consacré aux règles d’interprétation. L’analyse constitutionnelle brésilienne est faite en prenant en compte les cadres données par le protocole interprétatif de l’article 69 de la Convention Européen de Brevets. Ensuite, nous proposons des paramètres internes et externes pour guider l’interprétation des revendications et déterminer l’objet du brevet. La démarche vise à assurer au titulaire du brevet le plein droit et aux tiers la sécurité juridique. / The thesis makes a balance between the protection scope of the patent and legal certainty. It is based on the legislation and decisions raised in Brazil andEurope. In this course, it first attacks the determination of the patent object during its drafting: firstly the description is subject of a formal and substantive analysis. Then the claims are analyzed in terms of its structures, as well as of its substantive conditions. The “means” notion is defined. The role of the description and the claims in determining the patent object being defined, the second part of the study is devoted to the rules of the interpretation. A Brazilian constitutional analysis is made taking into account the limits established by the Protocol on the Interpretation of Article 69 of the European Patent Convention. Then, we offer internal and external parameters to guide the interpretation of the claims, and determine the scope ofthe patent. The approach aims to ensure to the patentee the good right, as well as legal certainty to third parties.

This thesis examines the establishment of servitudes by positive prescription in Scots law, with particular reference to the doctrine’s conceptual development and the nature of possession required under section 3 of the Prescription and Limitation (Scotland) Act 1973. The thesis is divided into three main parts. The first provides a historical account of the law of positive prescription as applied to servitudes from the 17th century to the 20th century, culminating in its statutory expression in section 3(1) and (2) of the 1973 Act. The second considers what the 1973 Act means when it says that a servitude must be “possessed” for the prescriptive period. While jurists in Scotland have traditionally thought that a right cannot be possessed as such, since it lacks a physical corpus, they have tended to view the apparent exercise of a right as equivalent to the detention of a corporeal object and concluded that servitudes can be “possessed” (or “quasi-possessed”) by analogy. An alternative approach is to say that, while possession denotes a comprehensive factual control of an object for one’s own benefit, certain lesser degrees of factual control are also protected by the law. On this view, the (apparent) exercise of a servitude constitutes a limited “possession” of the land itself and is protected accordingly. Part two argues that this alternative approach is the more coherent and provides helpful analytical tools for understanding what is really going on when a servitude is “possessed” for the purposes of prescription. The third part of the thesis consists of a detailed analysis of the nature of the possession required to establish a servitude by positive prescription. In particular, possession “as if of right” is shown to consist of two “steps”: firstly, the prescriptive claimant must show sufficient possession to indicate that a servitude is being asserted; and, secondly, the possession must not be “by right”, i.e. referable to another right already held by the claimant. After this, the statutory requirements of openness and peaceableness are considered in detail.

Les biens ne semblent exister que pour être classés, distingués et appropriés, mais ne sont guère envisagés indépendamment des droits réels qui s’y rapportent. Or, la multiplication pléthorique des droits réels pourrait bien révéler la diversité des objets possibles du droit réel. Ces objets ne sont pas des choses du monde extérieur, mais une réalité abstraite que le droit construit au terme d’une opération de qualification: ce sont des objets juridiques, parce qu’ils sont déjà envisagés par le droit objectif à l’occasion de l’application d’une règle de droit positif qui impose l’appréciation de certains éléments de fait propres à en révéler l’existence. Le droit objectif construit donc une réalité qui lui est propre, avant même qu’il soit fait référence à un éventuel droit réel. Pour autant, la technique juridique n’est jamais inerte. Il existe des mécanismes permettant à la volonté de modifier la consistance ou l’affectation des objets juridiques et, partant, d’agir sur le régime des biens. Ces opérations sont à la fois caractéristiques et spécifiques de la technique du droit réel, employée pour façonner la réalité que perçoit le droit objectif. Les prétentions subjectives à la jouissance des objets juridiques rejaillissent, cependant, sur la conception que l’on se fait du droit réel, au point d’occulter sa dimension technique derrière les prérogatives qu’il semble conférer aux sujets de droit. / In French property law, things only seem to exist in order to be classified or owned. They are scarcely described in themselves, independently from rights in rem. The multiplication of these rights suggests, however, that they only reflect the diversity of underlying property objects. Such objects are not things from the external world, but an abstraction which the legal system constructs upon characterising certain facts and giving them a legal denomination. The application of a legal rule requires the appreciation of factual elements which, in turn, reveal the existence of an object filled with juristic qualities, before a property right even exists. Yet, legal technique is never entirely passive. The law provides certain mechanisms through which it is possible to modify the legal consistency and the purpose served by juristic objects and, therefore, to change the rules applicable to them. These results are both characteristic of and specific to in rem legal techniques. However, when legal subjects assert claims to the possession of an object, their pretensions also transform our understanding of in rem mechanisms, obscuring their technical function beneath the rights and powers which they seem to grant these individuals.

This thesis analyses how intellectual property (IP) laws are used in the home console game industry and in particular how these laws are used to capture the returns on investment, which may indirectly provide a stimulus to innovation. The relationshipis evaluated in three selected markets: The United States (US), the European Union (EU) and People's Republic of China (PRC). The first two of these are selected as representative of developed markets whilst the latter as an instance of an emerging market. This thesis analyses and illustrates ways in which three major types of intellectual property rights - patents, copyright and trademarks - operate in this sector of industry. This thesis evaluates this relationship via a unique approach, adopting both a legal and economic analysis. The thesis starts with a detailed market analysis of this industry to identify key factors that affect individual firms' abilities to capture returns on investment. This is followed by section II (comprising Chapters II to IV) which goes on to examine the effects of each type of IPR on these factors in the developed markets of the US and Europe. The analysis in section III shifts the focus from these developed markets to the emerging market in the PRC. It identifies the unique attributes and problems of the Chinese market and demonstrates how contemporary local IP laws can be used to tackle these problems. It is the view of this thesis that IP laws theoretically can be used to maximise a firm's return on investment while not distorting competition; hence, the thesis suggests that IPRs may indirectly create incentives to innovate.

In Haram City, amidst Egypt's 2011-2013 revolutionary period, two visions of the city in the Global South come together within shared walls. In this private suburban development marketed as affordable housing, aspirational middle class homebuyers embellish properties for privilege and safety. They also come to share grounds with resettled urban poor who transform their surroundings to sustain basic livelihoods. With legality in disarray and under private administration, residents originally from Duweiqa - perhaps Cairo's poorest neighbourhood - claim the right to squat vacant homes, while homebuyers complain of a slum in the gated community. What was only desert in 2005 has since become a forum for vivid public contestation over the relationship between morality, ownership, and order in space - struggles over what ought to be common in a compound. This ethnography explores residents' own legal geographies in relation to property amidst public-private partnership urbanism: how do competing normative discourses draw community lines in the sand, and how are they applied to assert ownership where the scales of 'official' legitimacy have been tipped? In other words: in a city built from scratch amidst a revolution, how is legality invented? Like the compound itself, sections of the thesis are divided into an A-area and a B-area. Shifting from side to side, four papers examine the lives of squatters and then of homeowners and company management acting in their name. Zooming in and out within sides, they depict discourses over moral ownership and then interpret practices asserting a concomitant vision of order. First, in Chapter 4, squatters invoke notions of a moral economy and practical virtue to justify 'informal' ownership claims against perceptions of developer-state corruption. Next, Chapter 5 illustrates how squatters define 'rights' as debt, a notion put into practice by ethical outlaws: the Sayi' - commonly meaning 'down-and-out' or 'bum' - brokers 'rights' to coordinate group ownership claims. Shifting sides, Chapter 6 observes middle class homeowners' aspirations for "internal emigration" to suburbs as part of an incitement to propertied autonomy, and details widespread dialogue over suburban selfhood in relationship to property, self-interest, and conviviality. Lastly, Chapter 7 documents authoritarian private governance of the urban poor that centres on "behavioural training." Free from accountability and operating like a city-state, managers simulate urban law to inculcate subjective norms, evoking both Cairene histories and global policy circulations of poverty management. Towards detailing how notions of ownership and property constitute visions and assertions of urban law, this project combines central themes in ethnographies of Cairo with legal geography on suburbs of the Global North. It therefore interrogates some key topics in urban studies of the Global South (gated communities, affordable housing, public-private partnerships, eviction-resettlement, informality, local governance, and squatting), as Cairo's 'new city' urban poor and middle classes do themselves, through comparative principles and amidst promotion of similar private low-income cities internationally. While presenting a micro-history of one project, it is also offers an alternative account of 2011-2013 revolutionary period, witnessed from the desert developments through which Egyptian leaders habitually promise social progress.

This empirical thesis explores the ways some Third World States use the patent regime as set out in the TRIPS Agreement to effect certain development and public health goals. It also investigates how non-state actors in these countries participate in patent law making, thereby creating narratives and counter-narratives that are challenging global norms on pharmaceutical patent protection. To do this, the thesis takes the three different examples of Brazil, India, and Nigeria and tells the story of patent law making within each of them. Adopting a Third World Approach to International Law as a macro-theoretical guide and nodal governance theory as a supplement, the thesis maps the broad interpretations and contestations of international patent law within the Third World. In doing this, the thesis pays particular attention to the everyday life of international patent law through the examination of practices that unfold through the different sites and objects in which international law operates today. In unpacking the patent law making in the aforementioned countries, the thesis posits that there is an emerging body of IP jurisprudence from the Third World that is expanding the aperture on norms governing pharmaceutical patent rules and medicines access discourse. In other words, the politics of international law making and implementation is shifting dramatically due to the confluence of different actors from various sectors in different forums in Brazil and India that are articulating counter-hegemonic pharmaceutical patent rules. The concomitant effect is not only the adoption of alternative pharmaceutical patent laws that are pro-human rights – especially pro-public health rights – in its articulation, but are also hermeneutic expressions of resistance against, and reform of, the international IP regime. In interrogating these narratives and counter-narratives that frame the global intellectual property regime in Third World forums, this thesis articulates successful counter-hegemonic discourses on patent law making and extrapolates lessons for Nigeria.

Western intellectual property frameworks have at least one feature in common: performers are less protected than authors. This situation knows many justifications, although all but one have been dismissed by the literature: performers are simply less creative than authors. As a result, the legal protection covering their work has been proportionally reduced compared to that of their authorial peers. This thesis investigates this phenomenon that it calls the 'author-performer divide'. It uncovers the culturally-rooted principles and legal reasoning that policy-makers and judges of Australia, France, the United Kingdom and the United States have developed to create in the legal narrative a hierarchy between authors and performers. It reveals that those intellectual property systems, though continuously reformed, still contain outdated conceptions of creativity based on the belief in ex nihilo creation and over-intellectualised representations of the creative process. Those two precepts combined have led legal discourse to portray performers as their authors' puppets, thus underserving of authorship themselves. This thesis reviews arguments raised against improving the performers' regime to challenge the preconception of performers as uncreative agents and questions the divide it supports. To this end, it seeks to update the representations of creativity currently conveyed in the law by drawing on the findings of other academic disciplines such as creativity research, performance theories as well as music, theatre and dance studies. This comparative inter-disciplinary study aims to move current legal debates on performers' rights away from the recurring themes and repeated arguments in the scholarship such as issues of fixation or of competing claims, all of which have made conversations stagnate. By including disciplines beyond the law, this analysis seeks to advance the legal literature on the question of performers' intellectual property protection and shift thinking about performative forms of creativity.

No description available.

This thesis explores the arguments and evidence for reform of commercial property leases through legislative intervention. It identifies and explains the causes of landlord and tenant disputes arising mainly from poorly drafted commercial leases. It investigates the relevant codes for leasing business premises, the Law Society business lease, the regulatory reform of part II of the 1954 Act, the British Property Federation lease, and various other attempts at reform of commercial property leases. This research also investigates the potential need for ethnic minorities in commercial property to have the key legal terms of commercial property leases made available in both English and other languages. There is little previous academic research on reform of commercial property leases through legislative intervention (other than Crosby Reading reports). This research aims to contributute towards filling the gap that exists in the literature by investigating reform through legislation. This research involved semi-structured interviews with participants from five groups: lawyers, surveyors/agents, landlords, tenants and business owners. Most interviewed supported reform of commercial property leases through legislative intervention, and better guidance explaining the meaning of key legal terms of commercial property leases, especially from ethnic minority businesses.

Many scholars have suggested that current copyright law is ill-equipped to the challenges of determining the authorship of collaborative work. This thesis analyses four case studies of large scale collaboration (Wikipedia, Indigenous art, scientific collaborations and film) in order to consider how best to determine the authorship of the creative works that they produce for the purposes of copyright law. Current scholarship and much of the case law has tended to favour a restrictive approach to the grant of joint authorship status, in order to minimise the number of potential authors of a work. This is motivated by instrumental/pragmatic concerns related to the ease of exploiting a copyright work. As joint authors are often joint first owners of copyright, proponents of this approach fear that a minor contributor might cause hold-up problems by refusing to consent to licence or assign their copyright interest. This thesis argues that an instrumental/pragmatic approach to the application of the joint authorship test is undesirable, because it distances the test both from the creativity reality of collective authorship and from copyright’s notion of the author. In addition, the instrumental/pragmatic approach relies upon assumptions about creators, the creative process and the exploitation of creative works which are not borne out in the case studies. Building on the insights from the four case studies, the thesis argues that the best approach to applying the joint authorship test to works of collective authorship is one that is inclusive (of all those who have made a more than de minimis contribution of creative choices to the protected expression) and contextual (in that it takes the context of creativity into account). In coming to this conclusion the thesis also offers broader lessons about the nature of authorship and the ongoing relevance of copyright law standards for the regulation of collaborative creativity.