Intellectual property has again seen rapid development over the last three years. Not only have there been new cases on existing points that take the debate further and the odd change in legislation at domestic and at European level. In the trade mark fi eld AdWords just about made it to the sixth edition at proof stage. Since then there has been a fl ood of cases in Luxembourg and a whole new section of trade mark law has emerged. Copyright saw an important follow-up on Infopaq and the emergence of the Beijing Treaty and the Orphan Works Directive, to name just these. And the Unitary Patent has fi nally become a reality. All these are new additional areas in which intellectual property is expanding and the size of the book has therefore grown despite my best eff orts to keep it under control. For this very reason some of the less essential material has been left out of the printed version of the book and can now be found on the online resource centre. As there are European instruments and statutes that essentially overlap in both patent and trade mark law the Online Resource Centre will also off er a table of correspondence between the relevant Articles and sections respectively. So whenever the book refers to the UK statute it will be easy to fi nd the corresponding Articles in the directive, the regulation, and the EPC. Th is seventh edition benefi tted greatly from the preparatory work of my research assistant, Adamantia Rachovitsa, and from the outstanding work of my team at Oxford University Press, including Camille Poiré, Kate Whetter, Kate Gilks, Tom Young and Jeremy Langworthy. My sincere thanks go to all of them. I have attempted to state the law as it stands on 20 March 2013.