Extraterritoriality: intellectual property

Intellectual property rights, particularly patent, copyright, and trademark, have been the subject of international treaties for quite some time. While international agreements have embraced certain cooperative processes, however, intellectual property rights are viewed differently in different countries in terms of purpose and substance. For extraterritoriality, that means that the use of one nation’s intellectual property to leverage control over the acts and markets of another have significant implications for sovereignty. This chapter describes the issues facing extraterritorial intellectual property rights and describes how sovereignty concerns could be vindicated through a robust use of comity. The chapter suggests that when the conflict is one over the validity within the foreign country, comity concerns should be at their apex. The chapter concludes that given the weighty issues of sovereignty involved, courts should be reluctant to extend intellectual property rights extraterritorially, if not completely eschew such efforts.