From a Rights-Based to a Procedural Approach: Re-Contextualizing Intellectual Property Rights

It is one of the fundamental principles of German private law that absolute subjective rights enjoy comprehensive protection against unlawful infringement. In IP-law this – former? - certainty has been considerably shaken in recent years. We have been witnessing an ongoing restructuring or remodelling of the respective positions of the parties involved on two levels: the exclusive right's scope and its remedies. The presentation highlights this development in patent and copyright law as a "procedural approach“ toward IP law. This can be seen as an instrument of IP law’s "self-limitation“ to further address the expansive tendencies of the modern (intellectual) property (rights) regime.