Establishing precedents: jurisdictional interpretation of intellectual property

Abstract

The full implementation of the Dominican Laws 20-00 on Industrial Property and Copyright 65-00 is still forthcoming in the country. Legal divisions have been recently introduced in the curricula of certain law schools, but they are equally subject to an incipient presence in court, of the domain and practice of certain number of judges and lawyers. Despite this early development, administrative bodies, lower courts, courts of appeal and the Supreme Court have been rendering resolutions, judicial decrees, ordinances and judgments about authorship processes and industrial property matters. These are weighing upon a variety of subjects in the procedural and regulatory levels have been experimented.

There are no figures on the number of decisions that have been produced, but the proliferation of jurisprudence is noteworthy. Some of these decisions favor legal certainty, others distort of the spirit and meaning of the legal system, but ultimately, they interpreted those laws that required judicial guidance. In this article we discuss a selection of such decisions, which we consider of great significance on a path that is just beginning to be cleared. However for their inclusion, we considered their value as precedents, even though they are not necessarily exemplary from the point of view of the depth in the interpretation of the provisions of our intellectual property laws.