Magister Legum - LLM / The rights relating to a trademark are said to be found in the fact that proprietors have acquired goodwill and a repute in their mark. Trademark law has always protected that aspect of what a trademark embodied, inter alia, to serve as a symbol of where a product originates from and guarantee quality by the setting the registered trademark proprietor’s goods apart from those of his competitor. The dilution of a trademark is one of the most challenging issues facing the sphere of trademark law in South Africa. Trademark proprietors have in the past relied successfully on primary and secondary or extended infringement. There has, however, been a dearth of cases on infringement by dilution thus far. The research in this study will primarily take the form of an evaluation of the development of the anti-dilution action and why there is dearth of successful cases in South Africa. Trademark proprietors are at risk of suffering financial loss if they are not able to protect their marks from dilution. The thesis will make recommendations whether the dilution provision contained in the Act need reform or whether the approach to the application of the anti-dilution provisions by our judiciary needs to change.

The role of intellectual property (IP) rights, such as patents, in innovation is the subject of an ongoing debate. Using a sudden shift in the patentability of genomic compounds, this dissertation contributes new evidence to this debate by shedding light on three different roles that patents can play in innovative processes. In three complementary essays, I examine the impact of patents on follow-on innovations, markets for technology, and scientific research. Compiling data on the population of patents on isolated genes, I show that their sudden invalidation has increased innovation in commercialized diagnostic tests, but decreased the cooperative agreements among the biopharmaceutical firms. I further show that these effects are heterogeneous across firms and markets. The results of my analyses, however, present no significant evidence of patents hindering the scientific progress. The findings of this study provide novel contribution to a vigorous academic debate on IP rights and inform policy by discussing the consequences of a recent high-profile ruling on the patent-eligibility of genomic compounds.

Integrated Circuit (IC) designs are increasingly moving towards Intellectual Property (IP) reuse for various targeted products and market segments. Therefore, there is a need to share and synergize internal bus architectures to enable the reuse of IP blocks for various ASIC and SoC applications. Due to the different market segments of various ASICs and SoCs, design teams and architects have opted to use customized internal bus architectures to suit the respective targeted features for their market segments. As a result, many ASIC and SoC companies that produce microprocessors for computers, microcontrollers for consumer electronics as well as memory and I/O controller chipsets have opted to use different internal interfaces, designs and IPs for the different products that they sell. A modular and configurable bus architecture that is flexible and capable of supporting IPs from various ASICs and SoCs would serve to solve many of the problems relating to IP reuse for various applications from a front end design perspective. There are several approaches to resolve this, for example, using a standard existing open source bus, a new all-encompassing bus that covers the needs of the majority of designs and a customization of a particular bus level such as the interface layer, where part of the bus features are fixed and the rest of them are determined by individual design groups. This research covers the analysis of existing bus architectures in industry and considers the various options for bus architecture optimization for design modularity, bus performance and IP reuse with existing technology. The architecture definition, design, logic simulation and performance comparisons of the proposed bus architecture on industry standard RTL design and validation tools was then conducted.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第20875号 / 経博第570号 / 新制||経||284(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 柴田 章久, 教授 矢野 誠, 准教授 遊喜 一洋 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DGAM

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The natural desire to express the human experience through song, dance, speech and movement have characterised culture and society throughout history. From frantic dances around fires, to comedies and dramas at the ancient theatres, to sold out arena concerts, all driven by the same fundamental spirit of creation and expression. The unification of intellectual creation and physical action that constitutes a performance were for a long time only a transient activity, but that all changed with the introduction of recording technology. To protect the economic and moral interests of performers, a new form of intellectual property right, known as performers right, was introduced. This new form of IP-right was based on a similar rationale as the one for copyright protection of artistic and literary works, and it allowed performing artists to exercise a certain degree of control over fixations of their work. The modern development of image manipulation has come to challenge the integrity of performers rights however. Deepfakes is a form of AI-assisted technology that has made the synthetic manipulation of images, sound and video possible in ways previously unseen, in terms of quality, quantity and accessibility. The manipulation of videos by changing faces or voices of individuals raises a number of questions in a variety of legal areas. In order to bring clarity to the relation between deepfakes and performers rights, the condition under which a deepfake can constitute an infringement, and a granter, of performers rights under EU law, was investigated in this thesis. By primarily relying on a legal dogmatic method to interpret and systematise the existing EU legislation, case law and international treaties in the field of intellectual property, the synthetic manipulations of recorded performances were studied in relation to the applicable law. It was concluded that deepfakes may infringe on the rights of performers if the manipulated content constituted a reproduction of a fixation of a performance. Furthermore, it was also established that a deepfake in itself can not constitute a source of performers rights, due to its synthetic nature

学位プログラム名: 京都大学大学院思修館 / 京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(総合学術) / 甲第21231号 / 総総博第3号 / 新制||総総||1(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院総合生存学館総合生存学専攻 / (主査)教授 竹本 佳司, 特定教授 大嶌 幸一郎, 教授 大野 浩章 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy / Kyoto University / DFAM

Several studies have tracked the rise in music piracy following the creation of Napster, analyzing the attitudes and behaviors associated. But new developments, such as streaming services and social media, have transformed the relationship between creators and users. This paper seeks to revisit the topic, reexamine past results, and evaluate public opinion in this current technological landscape. Understanding the new attitudes and behaviors associated with illegal music downloading through a questionnaire reveal important implications for the future of intellectual property legislation. These findings give some insight into the perceptions of ownership over intangible property to hopefully improve consumer and industry interactions.

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