Design Rights in EU PTAs - Where Does Such Internationalization Lead?

Abstract

It has been widely acknowledged that current international intellectual property (IP) standard setting is carried through bilateral and plurilateral negotiations, and that the EU is very much involved in this process. It is notably the case of standards pertaining to the rights protecting designs, which received a particularly flexible set of minimum standards under the TRIPS WTO agreement. Building on the growing research both in IP rights in preferential trade agreements and design law, this paper looks at the IP chapters of EU agreements with third countries, assessing their deepness and the flexibility they maintain to uncover the trends of such design law internationalization. It evaluates how design rights, which have been seen in the past as less instrumental for business expansion abroad compared to trademark right and copyright, start to be elevated as strategic tools for business internationalization.