The Measure of All Things

The wonderful success of our last IP retreats on "The Handsight Bias", "Injunctions at a junction?" and "Nationalism vs. Globalization in IP" encourages us to invite again opinion leaders, including judges, academics, officials, litigators, patent attorneys, an in-house counsels, to discuss another central topic of intellectual property law.

The ultimate questions in IP, namely if and to what extent a creation or a designation deserves legal protection under patent, design, trademark and/or copyright law are to be answered by a human, but from the standpoint of fictitious persons. In patent law, this is the person of average skill in the art, in design law the average consumer with an interest in designs, in trademark law the average consumer, and in copyright it seems less clear. What are the underlying policy considerations, and where do they differ between the IP rights? How do practitioners cope with the task of putting themselves into the mind of a fictitious person? To what extent can empirical methods help to make this task a less subjective and more objective one? Is this fictitious person the same for the assessment of persistence of an IP right and for the assessment of the scope of protection?

Wo: Seehof Küsnacht