Hello, I'm Dr. Jennifer Davis and I'm a member of the Centre for Intellectual Property

and Information Law at the Law Faculty of the University of Cambridge and I'm here to talk to you about the EU and intellectual property.

Now intellectual property,

trademarks, patents, copyright, designs and confidential information has often been called the

product of the mind, but generally it's embodied in physical objects, a copyright work in a book,

a trademark on a piece of clothing. Now, the intellectual property has been a major preoccupation of the EU for quite a period of time.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

Intellectual property, being abstract, easily crosses national boundaries, so that if I go to the EU, I will find a can of Coca-Cola,

with the brand Coca-Cola on it, everywhere in the EU, even though perhaps it was bottled

in only one member state. The other reason why there is this preoccupation is precisely because

intellectual property crosses international boundaries so easily,

so it's important for the EU to have a system to protect intellectual property,

which is uniform across the market, since creating a single market, it's one of its key goals.

So in the past few years, trademark law has been harmonized across the whole of the EU.

It is possible to get an EU registered trademark and also an EU registered design and there's an EU

unregistered design.

There are a number of directives relating to copyright, such as a directive, which means that

there's the same length of protection for copyright works all across the

EU. A European patent is soon to be introduced and recently a directive on trade secret was passed

to ensure that all the European EU countries give the same level of protection for trade secrets.

So what would happen if Britain votes to leave the EU?

Well, possibly we could be like Norway and stay within the European economic area.

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