Taiwan is facing a GI conundrum, symptoms of which are conceptual confusion between GIs and trademarks, the perennial overhaul of the GI registration system and the structural collapse between IP and non-IP law. Taiwan’s situation epitomises the inherent difficulty of accommodating GIs under the general framework of IP. IP is a generic title for patents, copyright, and trademarks and so forth. There are two characteristics shared by the various forms of IP, namely, the intangibility of subject matter and the negativity of the rights granted. IP is a form of government intervention in the economy designed to correct market failures. While patents and copyright are designed to overcome the public good problem, the justification for trademarks involves information asymmetry. Taking a doctrinal, international and comparative approach and using economic theory, the thesis analyses the difficulties of accommodating GIs under the IP framework as manifested in the TRIPS Agreement, which establishes GIs as a form of IP, and its two implementing paradigms, namely, the US trademark paradigm and the EU sui generis paradigm. The TRIPS GI provisions are anomalous in the IP framework. The US paradigm represents efforts to subsume GIs under existing trademark law. These efforts result in theoretical uncertainties because of the inherent incompatibility between the concept of GIs and trademarks. The EU paradigm establishes GIs as a separate category of IP, which represents a deviation from established IP system.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:588209 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Wang, Szu-Yuan |
| Publisher | University of Newcastle upon Tyne |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10443/1869 |
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