Exhausting Intellectual Property Rights A Comparative Law and Policy Analysis

Even as globalization seems to be in retreat in political circles, the march of commercialization and markets continues. Government policies, whether tariffs, exits, or walls, cannot impede the competitive drive to meet consumer demand for products and services, whether within national boundaries or across them. In the sphere of intellectual property rights, the doctrine of exhaustion serves to limit the rights of intellectual property owners after a specific exercise of some or all of the rights. This volume provides an assessment of the successes and failures of the exhaustion doctrine as it has been applied through recent judicial decisions in the United States and the European Union. Irene Calboli and Shubha Ghosh explore how evolving interpretations of the exhaustion doctrine affects the large trade in gray market products and other international trade issues. A comparative approach to exhaustion, Exhausting Intellectual Property Rights offers a unique discussion of the often overlooked issue of overlapping rights.

Foreword Jerome Reichman; 1. The persistent policy pull of exhaustion; 2. Incentives and exhaustion policy; 3. Exhaustion and international trade; 4. Trademark exhaustion across jurisdictions; 5. Patent exhaustion across jurisdictions; 6. Copyright exhaustion across jurisdictions; 7. Overlapping rights and exhaustion; 8. Exhaustion in the digital age; 9. Exhaustion policy: challenges and choices.

Shubha Ghosh is Crandall Melvin Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law and Director of the Technology Commercialization Law Center. He is the author of Identity, Invention, and the Culture of Personalized Medicine Patenting (Cambridge, 2012) and co-author of Transactional Intellectual Property: From Startups to Public Companies (2015) and Intellectual Property: Private Rights, the Public Interest, and the Regulation of Creative Activity (2016).
Irene Calboli is Professor of Law at Texas A & M University School of Law and Transatlantic Technology Law Fellow at Stanford University. Her recent books include Diversity in Intellectual Property: Identities, Interests, and Intersections (Cambridge, 2015) and Geographical Indications at the Crossroads of Trade, Development, and Culture (Cambridge, 2017).