Law applicable to intellectual property rights in the European Union

This article deals with issues at the intersection of two fields, private international law and intellectual property law, viewed from the European Union perspective. The focus is on determining the law which governs different, aspects of intellectual property rights and relationships arising with respect to these rights. As much as these rights defy national borders due to their immaterial subject matter, they are still predominantly national when it comes to their territorial scope. Therefore, territoriality is the first point, and with that related differentiation of the core and other IP issues is the second point to be made in the following pages. Once these foundations are laid, the conflict of law provisions are discussed starting from the core IP issues, moving to contracts and closing with non-contractual obligations. Rather than discussing the abundant doctrinal and scholarly approaches, the purpose of this paper is to depict the current state of law in the E