Dev Gangjee: Relocating the Law of Geographical Indications
- PDF / 113,347 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 94 Downloads / 189 Views
Dev Gangjee: Relocating the Law of Geographical Indications Cambridge University Press, 2012. pp. xvii + 341. ISBN: 978-0-521-19202-6. €91.38 P. Sean Morris
Published online: 12 March 2013 Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law, Munich 2013
The traditional intellectual property system is dominated by the ‘‘big three’’: patents, copyrights and trade marks. These three forms of property rights on innovation and creation dominate legal scholarship and litigation. From a regulatory perspective, the big three are protected in local jurisdictions all over the world and are also part of the TRIPS Agreement – the system for intellectual property rights in the WTO – which has so dominated international intellectual property law that if one were not careful, one might mistakenly believe that TRIPS is its own selfcontained regime and not part of the WTO system at all. Within TRIPS itself there are provisions for the protection of geographical indications (GIs), which identify a product as originating in the territory of a member or a region or locality. GIs have been a source of debate (some would argue controversy) perhaps ever since the Paris Convention of 1883 – where the story of GIs began – which listed GIs as one form of industrial property to be protected. At that time, industrial property was a European concept, and GIs were never meant for outsiders. This fact has placed GIs in a position of being accused of monopolizing some regions of Europe. Then again, who doesn’t like Champagne (or even wine, which forms the ‘‘subject-matter kernel for GI in general’’, p. 124)? This is the story from which Relocating the Law of Geographical Indications embarks, to shed light on how this came to be in the contemporary world. The legal literature on GIs is often comprised of cryptic legal narratives that pursue a never ending ‘‘descriptive regurgitation of international treaties’’ (p. 16) and has sometimes lacked a coherent thesis other than to point out that GIs are protected and this is what the law says. Not so in this book, where the author has set out to ‘‘challenge the view that contemporary GI protection, as a distinct regime within IP law, has an essential or natural form’’ (p. 52). Dev Gangjee undertakes an arduous task that has been on the fringes of the intellectual property system, due in P. S. Morris (&) Kamnerintie 7C, 17, 00750 Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected]
123
256
P. S. Morris
part to ‘‘scholarly neglect’’ (p. 7) and sets out to bring GIs back from the cold by ‘‘seeking out the [many] gaps in explanation and awkward silences in the literature’’ (p. 16). This is not just a book that ventures into the narrative of law regarding GIs. It is a book that frames the historical dimensions of GIs – a sort of mess that was created in Paris in 1883, and which has endured for more than a century without any meaningful form of standardization and has had ‘‘taxonomic implications’’ (p. 24.) It is a book that tells the story of how the Old World has pursued a self-righteous i
Data Loading...
