Legal Boundaries of Intellectual Property Commercialization in the European Internal Market

The present work is adapted from the doctoral dissertation of the author, submitted to the University of Debrecen Géza Marton Doctoral School of Legal Studies (Hungary) in May 2021 and defended in June 2021.

In contextual terms, there two points author feels the need to expressly elucidate. Firstly, references made, throughout the study, to judicial processes involving the United Kingdom covers pre-Brexit stage, where the UK was a part of the Internal Market. Secondly, the formal and methodological reason for the author's refrainment from addressing patent exhaustion in a separate chapter needs to be highlighted. By the time of compilation of this study, the Unified Patent Court Agreement (and concordantly the Unitary Patent Regulation) had not come into force. Concordantly, albeit the aforementioned legislation encompasses exhaustion provision and its limitations having been formulated as "legitimate reasons", there is no Union legal order (yet) that has shaped around (or come to interpret) thereof at the Union level. Therefore, the appraisal of these definitions, in the absence of judicial interpretation, would be of speculative nature, in contrast to general analytic profile of the present study. With that, the general consideration of patent exhaustion and certain specific situations have been addressed in the doctrinal part, subsumed under the Chapter 4 of this work. On a final note, it goes without saying that the present work stands only to be the nucleus of an exploratory undertaking that has yet to expand, further and continuously.