Intellectual Property is a subject of great paradoxes. Intellectual property rights are largely national in scope yet a right-owner usually wants protection in many jurisdictions. Rights are also monopolistic, or at least exclusive, in nature yet operate in, and even act as a stimulant in, free market economies. And there is inherent conflict between the conflict of territorial intellectual property rights and the policy of free movement of goods and services in the European Union. Tritton faces, and resolves, all these paradoxes. But he almost creates one of his own. His aim was, he says, to produce a work which “provide[s] a complete and exhaustive study of intellectual property in Europe which is as useful to a patent agent as it is to a competition lawyer or intellectual property barrister”. To produce such a work might prove exhausting for the reader!

Anticipating the obvious criticism of such a project as a “curate’s egg” or “behemoth”, he illustrates the necessity the intellectual property lawyer faces to master not only the substantive law relating to the diversity of intellectual property rights, and the procedures for their acquisition, but also the effects of the European Community Treaty and the European Economic Area Agreement [EEA] (principally free movement of goods and services and competition policy) on the exercise of those rights, and the influence of jurisdictional issues in Europe.

Unquestionably the intellectual property practitioner must wield such a many stringed bow. Consequently this book contains three sections; the first deals with the substantive rights in Europe, the second looks at the effect of the European Treaty on the enforcement and licensing of intellectual property in Europe, and the third the jurisdictional issues relating to intellectual property litigation in Europe.

The first section adopts a novel approach to the substantive rights. To have studied each right (patents, copyright, trade marks, design rights, plant variety rights) in turn for each state in Europe would have been a lengthy, largely repetitive, if not impossible task, resulting in the feared behemoth. Accordingly Tritton looks at each right “top-down”. Much of European intellectual property law has been harmonized both through international Conventions and through the activities of the European Union. The Conventions, treaties and secondary legislation are therefore set out in