| Summary: | Standards are complex phenomena that exist in almost every area of human life, whether in the form of language, stock scenes in literature and films, computer user interfaces or protocols that allow data transfer over the internet. They are important building blocks for any form of human activity. Property rights in standards, provided by the laws of intellectual property, can foster their development by giving incentives to create technologies or works that are capable to become standards; but property rights can also impede further innovation since they allow the owner to exclude others from the use of the protected standard. Furthermore, standards are perceived to offer higher returns in form of royalties than "regular" technologies. In this context, standardization has been used as an argument to reduce the scope of protection for standard technologies with respect to computer user interfaces. === The thesis evaluates the soundness of a general argument of standardization for weaker protection in intellectual property law. It elaborates the arguments that are put forward to justify weaker protection in standards regarding the characteristics of standards and standardization as well as the justifications for intellectual property. It analyses the applicability of trademark, copyright and patent law to both already existing as well as developing standards. In particular, the concepts of genericness and descriptiveness in trademark law, the merger and scenes a faire doctrines in copyright law and the doctrines of patent misuse and patent abuse in patent law are discussed.
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