The patent has emerged as a dominant force in 21st century economic policy. This book examines the impact of the BRICS and other emerging economies on the global patent framework and charts the phenomenal rise in the number of patents in some of these countries.Guided by three of the world's leading thinkers on patent law and development, a group of experts from around the world, including the BRICS and key developed country patent powers, examine critical issues raised by patent globalization. Is increasing use of the patent system in China, India, Brazil and other emerging markets part of a deeper change in world technological leadership? Do the established patent powers of Europe, Japan and the USA continue to lead regulatory development of patent systems or are new models being formed in emerging markets? What are the effects of patent globalization on regions like the Middle East, Africa and lower income areas of Asia? Through the answers to these questions, the reader is furnished with a rounded understanding of 21st century patent globalization and emerging market dynamics. This book will appeal to patent law specialists, as well as scholars interested in the intersection between patents, innovation and economic development. In particular, the in-depth analysis would also be useful for policy analysts within government or research institutes working on patent policy issues. Contributors include: F.M. Abbott, D. Borges Barbosa, C.M. Correa, P. Drahos, M. El Said, C. Fink, P. Gehl Sampath, K. Karachalios, R. Kher, J. Kuanpoth, A. Kudlinski, T. Payosova, P. Roffe, S.K. Sell, Y. Tamura, G. Van Overwalle, Y.A. Vawda, H. Zhang, W. Zhuang

Intellectual property law is a subject of increasing economic importance and the focus of a great deal of legislative activity at an international and regional level. This 2004 collection brings together contributions from some of the most distinguished scholars in this exciting and controversial field, covering the full breadth of intellectual property law, that is, patents, copyright, trade marks and related rights. The contributions examine some of the most pressing practical and theoretical concerns which intellectual property lawyers face. These include: expanding the boundaries of IP in the face of new challenges, such as appropriate legal responses to digitisation and new technologies; relations between developed and developing worlds; the relationship between different legal traditions in a world of increasingly shared international norms; and the relationship between intellectual property rights and other areas of law, such as contract and criminal law.

Intellectual property is one of the most valuable forms of property in the modern world. From the perspective of companies producing knowledge-intensive goods, it encourages technological innovations for the benefit of humanity. For consumers of technology, it can be seen as a restriction on access to knowledge that inflates corporate rents. When genetic material crucial for human life is isolated from the commons, engineered and turned into private intellectual property, dissent is likely to emerge. Felipe Filomeno uses the case of Monsanto in South American soybean agriculture to theorize about the emergence and change of intellectual property regimes. Based on official documents, interviews, journalistic material, and academic literature, the study shows not only the relations of competition, coercion, and alliances that lie behind the post-1980 global upward ratchet of intellectual property protection but also the strategies that have the potential to reverse it.

An understanding of the changing nature of the law and practice of copyright infringement is a task too big for lawyers alone; it requires additional inputs from economists, historians, technologists, sociologists, cultural theorists and criminologists. Where is the boundary to be drawn between illegal imitation and legal inspiration? Would the answer be different for creators, artists and experts from different disciplines or fields? How have concepts of copyright infringement altered over time and how do such changes relate, if at all, to the cultural norms operating amongst creators in different fields? With such an approach, one might perhaps begin to address the vital and overarching question of whether strong copyright laws, rigorously enforced, impede rather than promote creativity. And what can be done to avoid any such adverse consequences, while maintaining the effectiveness of copyright as an incentive-mechanism for those who need it?

Copyright law is undergoing rapid transformations to cope with the new international digital environment. This valuable research Handbook provides a thorough and contemporary tableau of current thinking in copyright law. It traces the changes undergone and the challenges faced by copyright, as well as its roots and its diversity, combining to present a colourful picture of a dynamic research area. The editor brings together an elite group of international copyright scholars who offer incisive and original analysis of a wide range of issues and aspects of copyright law, and in some cases a multiplicity of perspectives on a single topic. Rigorous and often thought-provoking in nature, this research Handbook clearly maps the current landscape, and will also undoubtedly stimulate further research in the field. Analyzing the cutting edge of current copyright research, Copyright Law will be of great interest to researchers, students, practitioners and policymakers.

"SpringerBriefs in Biotech Patents" presents timely reports on intellectual properties (IP) issues and patent aspects in the field of biotechnology. This volume focus on particular aspects of the US patent law, which can have tremendous differences compared to the European law. This includes questions of biopatent prosecution, novelty, inventive step, written disclosure and sufficiency of enablement as well as questions of law enforcement of biotech patents.

This book covers an extensive range of critical issues in modern Intellectual Property (IP) law under three broad headings: Technology, Market Freedom and the Public Domain; Intellectual Property and International Trade; Traditional Knowledge, Technology and Resources. Uniting contributions at the cutting edge of IP research, the authors, all former or current members and associates of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute, University of London, address a number of diverse topics in relation to existing copyright, trademark and patent law. They examine political and juridical issues in fields such as geographical indications and traditional knowledge, agriculture and information technology, pharmaceuticals and access to medicines, human rights and IP strategy. The book will appeal to academics, researchers, students, and to practitioners concerned with all areas of intellectual property.

This study examines the law of intellectual property in China from imperial times to the present. It draws on history, politics, economics, sociology, and the arts, and on interviews with officials, business people, lawyers, and perpetrators and victims of 'piracy'. The author asks why the Chinese, with their early bounty of scientific and artistic creations, are only now devising legal protection for such endeavors and why such protection is more rhetoric than reality on the Chinese mainland. In the process, he sheds light on the complex relation between law and political culture in China. The book goes on to examine recent efforts in the People's Republic of China to develop intellectual property law, and uses this example to highlight the broader problems with China's program of law reform.

Intellectual Property and Health Technologies

Balancing Innovation and the Public's Health

Joanna T. Brougher, Esq., MPH

At first glance, ownership of intellectual property seems straightforward: the control over an invention or idea. But with the recent explosion of new scientific discoveries poised to transform public health and healthcare systems, costly and lengthy patent disputes threaten both to undermine the attempts to develop new medical technologies and to keep potentially life-saving treatments from patients who need them.

"Intellectual Property and Health Technologies" grounds readers in patent law and explores how scientific research and enterprise are evolving in response. Geared specifically to the medical disciplines, it differentiates among forms of legal protection for inventors such as copyrights and patents, explains their limits, and argues for balance between competing forces of exclusivity and availability. Chapters delve into the major legal controversies concerning medical and biotechnologies in terms of pricing, markets, and especially the tension between innovation and access, including:

The patent-eligibility of genesThe patent-eligibility of medical process patentsThe rights and roles of universities and inventorsThe balancing of access, innovation, and profit in drug developmentThe tension between biologics, small-molecule drugs, and their generic counterpartsInternational patent law and access to medicine in the developing world

As these issues continue to shape and define the debate, "Intellectual Property and Health Technologies" enables professionals and graduate students in public health, health policy, healthcare administration, and medicine to understand patent law and how it affects the development of medical technology and the delivery of medicine. "

The effort to win federal copyright protection for dance choreography in the United States was a simultaneously racialized and gendered contest. Copyright and choreography, particularly as tied with whiteness, have a refractory history. This book examines the evolution of choreographic works from being federally non-copyrightable, unless they partook of dramatic or narrative structures, to becoming a category of works potentially copyrightable under the 1976 Copyright Act. Crucial to this evolution is the development of whiteness as status property, both as an aesthetic and cultural force and a legally accepted and protected form of property. The choreographic inheritances of Loie Fuller, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham are particularly important to map because these constitute crucial sites upon which negotiations on how to package bodies of both choreographers and dancers - as racialized, sexualized, nationalized, and classed - are staged, reflective of larger social, political, and cultural tensions.

China's accession to the WTO and TRIPS heralded massive changes in Chinese intellectual property (IP) law. This book asks whether all aspects of Chinese law and practice are now TRIPs compliant. The study offers both Chinese and European perspectives. Examining substantive IP law in detail, the contributors conclude that the changes have been far reaching and TRIPS compliance has been achieved. They also argue that China's IP laws are now addressing the new challenges of the digital revolution and the global economy. Of equal importance is enforcement, and in this respect the book reveals that change started later and that further work remains to be done. The book highlights the important efforts that are underway and the undeniable progress that is being made. All these issues are placed in an international context, where the development agenda is becoming more important and where the discussion on the renegotiation of the TRIPS has started. The contributors include leading members of the Chinese judiciary, as well as academics, politicians and practitioners from China, Europe and Canada. The approach taken to the subject combines academic rigorousness with political realism and the practical needs of operating an effective law enforcement and judicial system in a vast and rapidly developing country. This book will be warmly welcomed by IP academics and researchers, policy makers, R&D departments around the world and investors in China.

In the new 'knowledge-intensive economies' Intellectual assets increasingly play a key part on balance sheets. There is an increasing global awareness that in order to promote innovation and the growth of the economy, businesses must fully recognise and exploit their intellectual assets. A company's ability to innovate rapidly and successfully is now regarded as essential and most breakthroughs are made by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), usually with no in-house legal professionals to help them. It is essential that those working with or creating intellectual property rights (IPR) are aware of the basics of Intellectual Property Law. Intellectual Property Asset Management provides business and management students at all levels with an accessible-straight-forward explanation of what the main Intellectual Property rights are and how these rights are protected. Locating the subject squarely in a business context and using case studies and examples throughout drawn from a wide range of business organisations, it explains how an organisation can exploit their rights through licensing, franchising and other means in order to make the best possible use of their IP assets. This book will provide students with: * the basic Intellectual Property law knowledge needed to identify a potential IP issue * the tools and understanding to assess an IP breach * the ability to identify where the problem cannot be solved in house and where expert legal assistance is required * the knowledge required to work effectively with lawyers and other legal professionals to achieve the desired outcome

Patent offices around the world have granted millions of patents to multinational companies. Patent offices are rarely studied and yet they are crucial agents in the global knowledge economy. Based on a study of forty-five rich and poor countries that takes in the world's largest and smallest offices, Peter Drahos argues that patent offices have become part of a globally integrated private governance network, which serves the interests of multinational companies, and that the Trilateral Offices of Europe, the USA and Japan make developing country patent offices part of the network through the strategic fostering of technocratic trust. By analysing the obligations of patent offices under the patent social contract and drawing on a theory of nodal governance, the author proposes innovative approaches to patent office administration that would allow developed and developing countries to recapture the public spirit of the patent social contract.

This fourth volume in the series contains further exploration of the main themes considered in the first three volumes and brings together perspectives on copyright from law and legal theory, political economy, human rights, cultural studies and social theory. New Directions in Copyright Law, Volume 4, offers insightful contributions from leading commentators on a range of issues affecting the development and direction of copyright law. The volume is divided into six parts. In the first part, the theoretical framework of copyright law is explored through the concepts of the market place of ideas and the public domain. While a number of chapters address substantive aspects of copyright law reform, the second part of the volume contains a chapter that marries substantive questions with issues around the mechanics, limitations and possibilities of the reform process. In the third part, two chapters consider the problematic notion of paternity rights from contrasting disciplinary perspectives. The interface between copyright law and the burgeoning of new technologies is considered through a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. In the fourth part of the volume legal theorists address issues around open access, open source, free software, and the implications of network theory for the relationship between copyright law and the Internet. Moving away from the concerns of so-called 'high technology', the fifth part of the volume considers the equally fraught question of the protection of traditional knowledge and cultural property through an analysis of the limits of law. The final part of the volume, which deals with copyright's uncomfortable relationship with human rights, sees a return to issues around the new technologies with a focus on the political economy of open source software, and on the issue of information access and fundamental rights.

The relationships between international intellectual property treaties, the United Nations international environmental treaties (first and foremost the Convention on Biological Diversity), the relevant customary norms and soft law form a complex network of obligations that sometimes conflict with each other. The first set of treaties creates private rights while the latter affirms the sovereignty rights of States over genetic resources and related knowledge and creates international regimes of exploitation of the same. Jonathan Curci proposes solutions to the conflicts between treaties through the concept of 'mutual supportiveness', including the construction of a national-access and benefit-sharing regime, mandatory contractual provisions in relevant international contracts, a defensive protection when genetic resource-related traditional knowledge is unjustly patented through the analysis of the concepts of 'ordre public and morality', 'certificate of origin' in the patent application and 'novelty-destroying prior art' and positive protection through existing and sui generis intellectual property rights and misappropriation regimes.

The purpose of this book is to examine the experience of a number of countries in grappling with the problems of reconciling the two fields of competition policy and intellectual property rights. The first part of the book indicates the variation in legislative models as well as the wide variety of judicial and administrative doctrines that have been used. The jurisdictions selected for study are the three major trading blocks with the longest experience of case law (the EU, the USA and Japan) and three less populous countries with open economies (Australia, Ireland and Singapore). In the second part of the book we look at a number of issues closely related to the interface between competition law and intellectual property rights. Separate chapters analyse the issue of parallel trading and exhaustion of IPRs, the issue of technology transfer, and the economics of the interface between intellectual property and competition law.

This book was first published in 2005. Copyright 'exceptions' or 'users' rights' have become a highly controversial aspect of copyright law. Most recently, Member States of the European Union have been forced to amend their systems of exceptions so as to comply with the Information Society Directive. Taking the newly amended UK legislation as a case study, this book examines why copyright exceptions are necessary and the forces that have shaped the present legislative regime in the UK. It seeks to further our understanding of the exceptions by combining detailed doctrinal analysis with insights gained from a range of other sources. The principal argument of the book is that the UK's current system of 'permitted acts' is much too restrictive and hence is in urgent need of reform, but that paradoxically the Information Society Directive points the way towards a much more satisfactory approach.

With the recent global economic crisis, attitudes and practices in relation to intellectual property valuation are changing as exemplified by the dichotomy explained in this book, which makes it unique. While there has been a move towards global harmonisation in terms of valuation of both tangible and intangible assets that are based on innovation, there is also a tendency against global harmonisation because of cultural attitudes and practices of different countries. This can be seen most acutely in relation to intellectual property valuation in Asia, especially East Asia, which often differs from the West's perception of valuation. The book is written by experts in intellectual property, valuation and innovation who are mainly practitioners covering innovators, marketers, accountants, social innovators and business and management academics. The breadth and practitioner background of most of the contributors make the material relevant to those involved in valuation, economics, business, management, accounting and finance, law and maritime insurance. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that cross-cuts all the above-mentioned disciplines and takes the understanding of intellectual property valuation to a new level.

The book examines the correlation between Intellectual Property Law - notably copyright - on the one hand and social and economic development on the other. The main focus of the initial overview is on historical, legal, economic and cultural aspects. Building on that, the work subsequently investigates how intellectual property systems have to be designed in order to foster social and economic growth in developing countries and puts forward theoretical and practical solutions that should be considered and implemented by policy makers, legal experts and the Word Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

China has the highest levels of copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting in the world, even though it also provides the highest per capita volume of enforcement. In this original study of intellectual property rights (IPR) in relation to state capacity, Dimitrov analyzes this puzzle by offering the first systematic analysis of all IPR enforcement avenues in China, across all IPR subtypes. He shows that the extremely high volume of enforcement provided for copyrights and trademarks is unfortunately of a low quality, and as such serves only to perpetuate IPR violations. In the area of patents, however, he finds a low volume of high-quality enforcement. In light of these findings, the book develops a theory of state capacity that conceptualizes the Chinese state as simultaneously weak and strong. It also demonstrates that fully rationalized enforcement of domestic and foreign IPR is emerging unevenly and, somewhat counter-intuitively, chiefly in those IPR subtypes that are least subject to domestic or foreign pressure. The book draws on extensive fieldwork in China and five other countries, as well as on 10 unique IPR enforcement datasets that exploit previously unexplored sources, including case files of private investigation firms.

Copyright governance is in a state of flux because the boundaries between legal and illegal consumption have blurred. Trajce Cvetkovski interrogates the disorganizational effects of piracy and emerging technologies on the political economy of copyright in popular music, film and gaming industries.

Concerns have been expressed that gene patents might result in restricted access to research and health care. The exponential growth of patents claiming human DNA sequences might result in patent thickets, royalty stacking and, ultimately, a 'tragedy of the anti-commons' in genetics. The essays in this book explore models designed to render patented genetic inventions accessible for further use in research, diagnosis or treatment. The models include patent pools, clearing house mechanisms, open source structures and liability regimes. They are analysed by scholars and practitioners in genetics, law, economics and philosophy. The volume looks beyond theoretical and scholarly analysis by conducting empirical investigation of existing examples of collaborative licensing models. Those models are examined from a theoretical perspective and tested in a set of operational cases. This combined approach is unique in its kind and prompts well founded and realistic solutions to problems in the current gene patent landscape.

This book critically investigates the patent protection of medication in light of the threats posed by HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis epidemics to the citizens of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (hereinafter "SSA" or "Africa"). The book outlines the systemic problems associated with the prevailing globalized patent regime and the regime's inability to promote access to life-saving medication at affordable prices in SSA. It argues that for pharmaceutical patents to retain their relevance in SSA countries, human development concepts must be integrated into global patent law- and policy-making. An integrative approach implies developing additional public health and human development exceptions/limitations to the exercise of patent rights with the goal of scaling up access to medication that can treat epidemics in SSA. By drawing on multiple perspectives of laws, institutions, practices, and politics, the book suggests that SSA countries adopt an evidence-based approach to implementing global patent standards in domestic jurisdictions. This evidence-based approach would include mechanisms like local need assessments and the use of empirical data to shape domestic patent law-making endeavors. The approach also implies revising patent rules and policies with a pro-poor and pro-health emphasis, so that medication will be more affordable and accessible to the citizens of SSA countries. It also suggests considering the opinions of individuals and pro-access institutions in enacting crucial pieces of health-related statutes in SSA countries. The approach in this book is sensitive to the public health needs of the citizens affected by epidemics and to the imperative of building local manufacturing facilities for pharmaceutical research and development in SSA.

There has been a continued debate in Europe over whether to change the patentability of software - or so-called computer-implemented inventions - and to follow the US model of allowing software patents. Albeit as European regulation has been stopped in July 2005, this heated debate stays with us for the time being. The European debate has shown a severe lack of empirical analysis on the possible impact of software patenting that goes beyond interest-driven rhetoric. This book seeks to address this shortcoming by taking a two-fold approach. Firstly, a survey of German software companies provides a representative overview of both general strategies to protect inventions and opinions regarding the future IPR regime in the context of innovation strategies - including the importance and use of Open Source software. Secondly, a series of case studies illustrate the varying impacts that patents and other protection strategies can have in specific contexts. foundation as for the economic impacts and policy implications of software patents upon which to base a discussion on how to shape the intellectual property regime for software. Thus, this volume will be of interest to industrial economists and students, as well as legal scientists and analysts and students of governance in innovation systems. It will also appeal to all policy stakeholders dealing with IPR issues and/or software developing industries.

Recent developments in trade marks law have called into question a variety of basic features, as well as bolder extensions, of legal protection. Other disciplines can help us think about fundamental issues such as: What is a trade mark? What does it do? What should be the scope of its protection? This volume assembles essays examining trade marks and brands from a multiplicity of fields: from business history, marketing, linguistics, legal history, philosophy, sociology and geography. Each chapter pairs lawyers' and non-lawyers' perspectives, so that each commentator addresses and critiques his or her counterpart's analysis. The perspectives of non-legal fields are intended to enrich legal academics' and practitioners' reflections about trade marks, and to expose lawyers, judges and policy-makers to ideas, concepts and methods that could prove to be of particular importance in the development of positive law.