This thesis examines how modern free trade agreements (FTAs) influence intellectual property (IP) protection in the European Union (EU) and which legal challenges follow. It combines doctrinal analysis of EU secondary law and Court of Justice case law with a problem-driven comparison of IP chapters in CETA, the EU–Japan EPA, the EU–Korea FTA and the EU–Singapore FTA, while TTIP is used only as a counterfactual comparator. Four sectoral case studies (pharmaceuticals, digital/technology, creative industries, and geographical indications) trace how treaty commitments translate into concrete legal effects.
The thesis identifies three main impact channels. First, FTAs can export EU regulatory templates, reducing transaction costs and misappropriation risks in partner markets. Second, they can harden selected baseline choices in treaty form, thereby raising the political and legal cost of later recalibration. Third, they can also shift governance through committee-managed updating and dispute settlement, relocating parts of regulatory adjustment away from ordinary legislative processes.
These effects are constitutionally mediated. The Charter-based proportionality framework and the autonomy of EU law limit external “overreach”: CJEU jurisprudence on Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPCs), copyright exceptions and intermediary liability, as well as Opinion 1/17 on CETA’s Investment Court System (ICS), confirm that treaty commitments cannot displace fundamental-rights safeguards or the Union’s interpretative monopoly. Therefore, the core tension is not “more” or “less” IP protection in the abstract, but whether FTAs preserve meaningful regulatory space for public-interest measures in access-sensitive domains (public health, data protection, freedom of expression and cultural access).
The thesis recommends a differentiated and constitutionally reflexive FTA strategy: operational public-interest safeguards (health and digital enforcement), enhanced transparency and participation, autonomy-preserving dispute-settlement design, and sector-sensitive flexibility rather than uniform TRIPS-plus drafting.