INDUSTRIAL PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE LIGHT OF THE LEGAL REGULATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF NORTH MACEDONIA AND THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

Abstract

Industrial property rights and copyrights are two branches of the so called intellectual property rights. These rights in contemporary times have turned into a sought-after investment that generates strong and predictable cash flows. This imposed the achievement of consensus by the countries at the end of the 19th century, first with the Paris Convention for the protection of industrial property (1883) and then with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886). The fact of the very large number of ratifications of the above-mentioned acts of an international character and membership in institutions such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a clear indicator of the trends of a unification of rules for the national standardization of issues from industrial property. The legal regulation of industrial property, nowadays, constitutes a legal normality of national legislations. As long as the possession of separate laws for concrete rights from industrial property, it is considered to be the highest level of their legal regulation within a country. The protection of industrial property rights in the Republic of North Macedonia and the Federal Republic of Germany has been established at the constitutional level. As each legislation belongs to one of the different systems mentioned above, this is one of the reasons that prompted the authors of this paper to research precisely the comparative aspect of these two legislations in force. The authors intend to achieve this goal through the use of a selected number of research-scientific methods, first of all: analysis, synthesis, normative, comparative, historical, inductive and deductive methods.