| 英文摘要 |
Under the intellectual property rights legal system, the patent law, trademark law, and copyright law, according to the purpose of enactment, each have its own interests and protection object matters that the laws want to maintain. If they are legal norms of intellectual property rights with different purposes, their respective scope of protection should have boundaries, and the subject matter of protection should be different. In general, utility patent rights protect utilitarian technical innovations; design patent rights protect the ornamental appearance of articles of manufacture; trademark law protects marks that identify the source of goods; copyright law protects expressions with a certain degree of creativity. In other words, only the utility patent rights protect “function”, and the design patent, trademark, and copyright laws have certain forms of exclusion and restriction on “functionality”, in order to avoid utilitarian technical innovations, which shall be protected under utility patent rights, evading the strict examination requirements of utility patent but still obtain patent-like exclusive rights form the design patent, trademark, or copyrights regimes. Therefore, it is important and beneficial to divide the scope of protection among different regimes of intellectual property rights. However, there are inherent complexities in applying the nonfunctional requirement which manifests itself differently in each regime. Regardless of the form the non-functionality requirement takes, applying it poses severe difficulties, because it is difficult to draw a clear line between functional and non-functional features. Therefore, this project will explore the role of functional doctrines in various fields of intellectual property rights. Should it be different because of the different legislative purposes and the differences in legal interests? Or instead, for the purpose to exclude utilitarian technical innovations out of the regimes beyond utility patent rights, functional doctrines should have a consistent interpretation? As so, how should the interpretation be? The purpose of this project, therefore, is to examine the substances of the functional doctrines and to propose a mechanism for applying these doctrines that may make them more workable. |
