Since 2010, the Inter-university chair in law and the Human Genome has been involved in an EU 7th Framework Programme funded Project called Sybhel, leading work package 5. The aim of this work package was to face the issues related to synthetic biology and intellectual property rights. In these years, the Chair organized two international workshops devoted to this topic, collecting a number of high level unpublished papers redacted by some of the most prominent experts in this field worldwide, including Stephen Maurer, Joachim Henkel, Ingrid Schneider, etc. We consider that it would be extremely interesting to have them all gathered in a unique contributed volume,