In the information society, the economic importance of intellectual property (IP) has grown tremendously in the last year, as has the complexity of its legal structure. This is particularly true for the European Union. Even specialists in one IP area often get lost or cannot manage to keep up with new developments in another IP area. Understanding European IP law is particularly difficult for non-EU citizens who are not familiar with the internal mechanisms of the European Union, its different legal traditions and the often complex overlay and interplay of EU and national norms. The same is true for EU and non-EU students, who want to obtain both an overview and gain a fundamental understanding of the subject matter which goes beyond a simple outline. This book has been written in order to answer these needs. It is a handbook aimed primarily at students, but also at lawyers – Europeans as well as non- Europeans – who want to familiarise themselves with the fundamental structure and current state of the subject matter. Fundamental knowledge in IP law is useful, but not strictly required. The book is not a Treatise in a classical sense, since in addition to the explanatory and summarising text it also contains a fair amount of original, verbatim text of original documents. However, because of the density of accompanying text written by the authors and the proportional distribution between text and materials, it differs from a traditional ‘Cases and Materials’ format: hence its subtitle ‘Text, Cases and Materials’. This somewhat new and unusual form of presentation has to do with the sheer volume into which the subject matter of European IP law has grown in the past years, which would indeed have turned a true ‘Cases and Materials’ book into a rather heavy ‘brick’ difficult to carry around.