In this brilliantly conceived and authoritative work the eminent intellectual property specialist Nuno Pires de Carvalho focuses on the mechanisms, obligations, and opportunities of trade secret protection under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). With the powerful knowledge base derived from his long experience both at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), he illuminates the crucial relationship of antitrust and industrial property, clearly demonstrating - in contrast to much "received wisdom" - the intrinsic pro-competitive nature of intellectual property and of industrial property in particular. Using an extraordinary wealth of practical detail, and offering hundreds of pointed hypothetical and actual examples, Pires de Carvalho dispels the murkiness around such essential concepts and provisions as the following:
- the inevitable interdependence of industrial property and antitrust law;
- abuses of patent rights and the vexed issue of patents and monopolies;
- the legal implications of international exhaustion under Article 6;
- the meaning of "balance of rights and obligations" under Article 7;
- divestiture and the fruits doctrine under Article 32;
- international cooperation in identifying antitrust violations in licensing agreements;
- protection of confidential information in court proceedings;
- protection of undisclosed test data against unfair commercial use under Article 39.3;
- and the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism in the context of undisclosed information.
Of special value in this book is the author's far-reaching analysis of thecontroversial emerging field of test data protection in industrial property.