The German law on employees' inventions requires employees to report to their employer any invention made in relation with the work contract. An employer claiming the right to the invention is obliged to pay a compensation to the employee. Up to now, this compensation is a matter of...

We analyze the legal reform concerning employees' inventions in Germany. Using a simple principal-agent model, we derive a unique efficient payment scheme: a bonus which is contingent on the project value. We demonstrate that the old German law creates inefficient incentives. However, the new...

Dieser Beitrag analysiert die geplante und zum Teil schon verwirklichte Reform des Gesetzes über Arbeitnehmererfindungen (ArbEG). Im Mittelpunkt der Analyse stehen die Vergütungen, die Arbeitgeber an einen Mitarbeiter zu zahlen haben, wenn sie dessen Erfindung in Anspruch nehmen. Bisher wurde...

In many patent infringement cases, the only practical way that the plaintiff can obtain relief is on a theory of secondary liability, which is generally referred to as indirect infringement. The remedy in patent cases frequently includes damages for past infringement. Because jury verdicts in...

How to structure IP laws in order to maximize social welfare by striking the right balance between incentives to innovate and access to innovation is an empirical question. It is a challenging one to answer, both because innovation is difficult to value and changes in IP protection are rare. The...

After providing a legal characterization of the open patenting phenomenon and discussing many of the empirical and theoretical experiences that relate to both Open Innovation and defensive patenting, this paper suggests standardized terms and conditions that a patent license should contain in...

Design patents are an area of intellectual property law focused entirely on the visual, unlike copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, or the various sui generis protections that have occasionally been enacted for specific types of innovation. Judges and lawyers in general are highly...

Empirical evidence on the interaction between regular patent and second tier patent systems in advanced economies is almost non-existent. This paper studies how the abolition of the Dutch short-term patent system in June 2008 was related with the patent filing activity at the Dutch patent...

A new defense against injunctions in FRAND cases has arisen in Germany, and its relationship to the Huawei defense (whether viewed as a competition or contractual matter) is largely unexplored. In August 2021, the “Second Act for the Modernization of Patent Law” (Zweites...