Introduction

The European Union has established a system of intellectual property protection of its own making. It embraces everything from plant varieties to patents, trade marks, designs, copyright and its related rights, and it includes some odd outgrowths. It has been developed at an accelerating pace. Trade mark protection stems from 1988 and 1994 with a gestation period of roughly twenty years. Design laws were harmonized in 1998 with the Community Design being introduced in 2001; overall this took about ten years. Whereas Community Plant Variety Protection came into being more rapidly, the introduction of Community rules for patents is dragging on for almost more than a generation, obliging the Community to create in the meantime, and in the shadow of the European Patent Organization, here and there some smaller add-ons on national protection. The law on copyright and related rights, by contrast, has been revolutionized by the Community within a decade by no less than seven directives, each of them being pushed through the legislative process within a few years.

The different periods of maturation of legislation are not due to a varying degree of political consensus in any of the fields of intellectual property. The controversies surrounding the extension of copyright protection to computer software have been no less vigorous than those that caused design protection to enter into force on the basis of a non liquet compromise. Nor could technological progress, which changed copyright so deeply, account alone for the divide.