This book discusses the main legal and economic challenges to the creation and enforcement of security rights in intellectual property and explores possible avenues of reform, such as more specific rules for security in IP rights and better coordination between intellectual property law and secured transactions law. In the context of business financing, intellectual property rights are still only reluctantly used as collateral, and on a small scale. If they are used at all, it is mostly done in the form of a floating charge or some other “all-asset” security right. The only sector in which security rights in intellectual property play a major role, at least in some jurisdictions, is the financing of movies. On the other hand, it is virtually undisputed that security rights in intellectual property could be economically valuable, or even crucial, for small and medium-sized enterprises – especially for start-ups, which are often very innovative and creative, but have limited access to corporate financing and must rely on capital markets (securitization, capital market). Therefore, they need to secure bank loans, yet lack their own traditional collateral, such as land.

The overall objective of the UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Secured Transactions (the Guide) is to promote low-cost credit by enhancing the availability of secured credit. In line with this objective, the Supplement on Security Rights in Intellectual Property (the Supplement) is intended to make credit more available and at a lower cost to intellectual property owners and other intellectual property rights holders, thus enhancing the value of intellectual property rights as security for credit. The Supplement, however, seeks to achieve that objective without interfering with fundamental policies of law relating to intellectual property.

Although individuals or companies can pursue civil remedies to address violations of their intellectual property rights, criminal sanctions are often warranted to ensure sufficient punishment and deterrence of wrongful activity. Congress has continually expanded and strengthened criminal laws for violations of intellectual property rights to protect innovation, to keep pace with evolving technology and, significantly, to ensure that egregious or persistent intellectual property violations do not merely become a standard cost of doing business for defendants.

This overview of the security problems in modern VLSI design provides a detailed treatment of a newly developed constraint-based protection paradigm for the protection of VLSI design IPs – from FPGA design to standard-cell placement, and from advanced CAD tools to physical design algorithms.

Considers the approach to IP under international trade, bio-diversity and climate change law, reviewing the different answers these systems offer to legal questions on the protection of IP and how these approaches may be recognised within the international IP system.

A movement emerges to challenge the tightening of intellectual property law around the world. At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online.

Introduction -- Intellectual property rights basics -- Global intellectual property holdings -- Contribution of intellectual property to U.S. economy -- The organized structure of IPR protection -- U.S. trade law -- Issues for Congress.