Intellectual Property and the Human Rights of Companies in Europe

This book is the first comprehensive account of the origins and rationale for the grant of human rights to companies in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Court's protection of corporations' intellectual property rights.

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The aim of this book is to investigate the history and rationale for the paradoxical extension of human rights to companies in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and to analyse the Court's jurisprudence on protection of companies' intellectual property in this light. The study shows how, before the adoption of the ECHR, the concepts of legal personality and possessions functioned as legal fictions in European civil and common law to facilitate ownership and sale of tangible and intangible property, shares, debts, securities and intellectual property. The Court's construction of the ambiguous text of Article 1 of the First Protocol and its application to corporate intellectual property rights is reviewed in this light and shown to have been initially anchored in the legal fictions of national laws and later expanded and reinforced by European Union law.