ABSTRACT
This report summarises the 2025 Roundtable on Evergreening in Intellectual Property (IP) Law held at the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute (QMIPRI), Queen Mary University of London. It examines how IP rights, including overlapping design and copyright protection, trade marks, and secondary pharmaceutical patents, are used to extend market exclusivity beyond their original scope. While participants debated the precision and usefulness of the term ‘evergreening’, there was broad agreement that the cumulative and sequential deployment of IP rights raises significant challenges for doctrinal coherence and competition policy. Rather than advancing a single conclusion, the report identifies key areas in which tensions between innovation, access, and enforcement warrant further research and regulatory attention.
Kavcar Penbegullu, Zeynep Kubra and Metsa, Gertrud and Tarawneh, Jasem and Shemtov, Noam and Dimita, Gaetano, Evergreening in Intellectual Property Law: Policies, Strategies AND Regulation (June 27, 2025), Queen Mary Law Research Paper No 488/2026.
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