Please answer the following questions.
1. Critically analyse the justifications for patent protection.
2. Critically discuss the potential impact of the unitary patent and the Unified Patent Court.
5. Critically discuss whether it is possible to obtain a patent on a sequence of DNA in (a) Europe and (b) the United States.
WORD LIMIT
3,500 words (excluding footnotes and bibliography).
It is suggested that you allocate 1,000 – 1,200 words per question, to a maximum of 3,500 words in total.
SOURCES
Please also note the following:
• You are expected to refer to academic sources such as books and academic articles in your answers.
• You should also read and refer to primary materials, such as cases and legislation, where possible. Please do not rely on online summaries of cases and legislation.
• Be careful about using websites – these are not generally authoritative legal sources! Do you really trust an article online when you don’t know who wrote it or whether it has been through any form of review? Does the article use proper references? Does the author have a particular bias or agenda?
• Online sources such as Wikipedia are not subject to any proper review and are therefore unreliable and should not be used. If you are unsure if a website is appropriate, please email me.
• Some websites can be a useful source of information. Examples include the websites of Law Commissions, Government departments or the website of the European Union (www.europa.eu) . Some important business and consumer organisations also produce publications which are available on their websites, e.g. www.beuc.org
REFERENCES
Please also read the following guidelines:
• You must fully reference all your work and include a bibliography.
• The bibliography should be located at the end of your work, and should be presented in a sensible manner.
• You must give full citations for cases, articles and books.
• Include page numbers if quoting from a case, article or book.
• If you are quoting you MUST use quotation marks.
• If you are using a large amount of information from one source (and do try not to do this!) then you need to individually reference each sentence or idea that comes from that source. It is not sufficient to put one reference at the end of a paragraph or page that has largely come from one source. Failure to adhere to this could be interpreted as weak academic practice or plagiarism.
• Footnotes should be used for referencing only, not for additional comments.
• use citation style OSCOLA
• Do not refer to databases such as westlaw as an “online source”. Westlaw is a database which allows you to access other sources such as articles and cases. It is not a source in and of itself.
