ipr harmonization eu - dklevine.com.pdfVIP

Some Economic Aspects of the European Harmonization of Intellectual Property Rights in Software and its Impact to Eastern EU Mr. Ville OKSANEN, Mr. Mikko VÄLIMÄKI Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) P.O.Box 9800, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland [ville.oksanen, mikko.valimaki,]@hiit.fi European Union has been harmonizing intellectual property rights (IPRs) legislation for over a decade. Harmonized business regulation is thought to be necessary for well functioning internal markets. Regional legal barriers and uncertainty about regulation in general may increase transaction costs and cause market failures. Yet it is anything but certain that the new Eastern European member states would benefit from common market regulation. We argue that harmonization benefits status quo, i.e. merely protects the interests of incumbents, before offering equal opportunities for new entrants. This trend is most visible in the regulation of rapidly evolving information technology industry. Therefore, we use the intellectual property rights regulation of software as an example. We first describe shortly the most relevant IPR regulation of software in Europe: directive 91/250/EEC on legal protection of computer programs (Software Copyright Directive), directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (EUCD), and finally the proposal 2002/0047 for a directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (Software Patents Directive). Special attention is given to