Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Geographical Indications

A Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Geographical Indications (Edward Elgar, 2016) has just been published, edited by Dr Dev Gangjee, an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a member of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre. 

This topical volume explores the legal protection of collective geographical ‘brands’ such as Champagne and Bordeaux as well as Darjeeling and Café de Colombia. Given the policy interest in this topic and range of researchers working on it, the strength of this handbook is that it draws on contributions from historians, geographers, sociologists, economists, anthropologists and intellectual property specialists. 

Amongst the debates it engages with are the extent to which the influential notion of terroir can be adapted from the context of wines and applied to other products as well as non-European contexts; whether Geographical Indications protection, by anchoring products in specific regions, can facilitate embedded development initiatives; and when a name may be said to be generic and therefore applicable to a general class of product, regardless of its origin.