This book is the result of the PhD project I started four years ago at Europa-Kolleg Hamburg. I had the great opportunity to work on it for one year at the European University Institute in Florence and to finalise the oeuvre during my stay with the European Commission's Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville. The subject matter of the book is intellectual property rights, patents in particular, and their process of harmonisation in Europe. At the beginning of the work, the intention was not to focus immediately on one narrow field in the huge realm of intellectual property...