El Agotamiento del Derecho a la Luz del Derecho Comunitario: Unión Europea y Comunidad Andina (Exhaustion of Rights in Community Law: European Union and the Andean Community)

Abstract

The intellectual property in general, gives its holders a number of exclusive powers, technically known as ius prohibendi, it is a series of individual rights that the law recognizes the creator of a work, inventor of a new technology or utility, designer and/or owner of a distinctive sign, and generally a person or legal entity from its ingenuity brings new-original-creations of any kind to society. In any case, these powers, like any type of right is not, and can’t be considered absolute, which is why the same law limits the exercise of ius prohibendi among these limitations is the exhaustion of rights, which means that once you have made an entry into the market of the product incorporating intellectual property by the rights holder or a third party authorized by him the exclusive right to distribute the property levied on is extinguished, why any operator may conduct commercial transactions on the same object, and will lead to so-called parallel imports. But the exhaustion of rights has different shades to be seen in this article, according to which the scope of the entitlement distribution can become national (restricted to the country which hosted the placing on the market), regional (restricted to a community of countries) or international (encompassing the whole universe).

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: exhaustion, exhaustion of rights, parallel imports, reimportation, ius prohibendi, mechanicum corpus, gray areas, repackaging, relabeling, industrial property, copyright, Andean Community, European Community, European Union, community model, international model, national model, regional model, first