Ellen Maathuis is working on a dissertation with the working title 'Vermogensrechtelijke knelpunten bij product as a service-contracten'.
In the literature, it has been argued that the transition to a circular economy leads to ownership becoming less important, or at least that in more and more cases the ownership of products does not lie with the end customer. Instead of ownership, the end customer only gets the use of the product, which is complemented by certain services that optimise this use. This is the core of the product-as-a-service concept: the customer gets a contractual right of use, while the product provider retains ownership and gets the product back at the end of the contract term. This study focuses on several property law bottlenecks involved in the product as a service concept.