This study brings together two major sources of growth in the modern economy: trade and new ideas. Trade is a crucial process to improve economic specialisation and raise the productivity of economies. It is also a channel to diffuse technology and knowledge across countries. International...

This paper advances that WHO Member States, having agreed to the objectives of advancing equity and solidarity for future pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, now must operationalize these. The paper offers suggestions for the ongoing WHO processes of: 1) review of recommendations...

The exclusive rights enjoyed by a copyright owner to reproduce his protected work in any material form, including any permanent or temporary storage in electronic form will have a direct impact on the lawful activities of an internet service provider (ISP). Any transmission of temporary copies...

This study brings together two major sources of growth in the modern economy: trade and new ideas. Trade is a crucial process to improve economic specialisation and raise the productivity of economies. It is also a channel to diffuse technology and knowledge across countries. International...

This paper considers legal implications that are likely to emerge from the implementation of a TRIPS Waiver decision. Assuming that a Waiver is adopted in the form presented in the May 2021 proposal by South Africa and India et al, we review the interaction between the Waiver and other...

Firm-to-firm relationships in global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and input production technologies are imperfectly excludable. The paper introduces a new taxonomy of...

We investigate how firms adapt to trademark protection, an extensively used but underexamined form of IP protection, by exploring a historical precedent: China’s trademark law of 1923 - an unanticipated and disapproved response to end foreign privileges in China. By exploiting a unique, newly...

The use of TRIPS flexibilities by WTO members involves interpretation of the obligations under TRIPS which can be challenged under the WTO dispute settlement system. Mutually agreed solutions, panel or Appellate Body decisions adopted in such disputes can thus impact the scope of TRIPS...

This study examines the variations within Asia of two exceptions to patent rights that are commonly justified under Article 30 of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the TRIPS Agreement), namely the research and experimentation...

This report provides an analysis of patents covering medicines in trials to treat COVID-19. The aim of the report is to support national patent offices and interested parties in developing countries with information that can serve as guidance for the examination of the claims contained in...

The ambiguity of the empirical results on the relationship between copyright and creativity calls for a better theoretical understanding of the issue, possibly enlarging the analysis to other factors such as technology and copyright enforcement. This paper addresses these complex policy issues...

Should the intellectual property rights on the first Covid-19 vaccines be temporarily lifted in applying the Trade-Related Aspect of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) flexibility? Is it right to grant the first generation of Covid-19 vaccines a special treatment from an IPR perspective? On what...

The paper discusses the flexibilization of the sui generis system of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) under European law recently introduced to allow for the manufacturing, stockpiling and export of covered products. Against this background, it examines the viability under the...

The World Trade Organization (WTO) linked intellectual property protection with trade. The WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), however, included a number of public health flexibilities in order to provide latitude to the Member States to...

Firms use a variety of practices to disclose the knowledge generated by their R&D activities, including, but not limited to, publishing findings in scientific journals, patenting new technologies, and contributing to developing standards. While the individual effects of engaging in the listed...

The paper explores the unique approaches to IP protection in the countries belonging to the Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle/African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions; the limited extent to which legal and policy...

A European Commission report into patent licensing (Radauer and Dudenbostel 2013) concluded that the technology industry out-licenses more non-core patents than the pharmaceutical industry. A literature review suggests that this variation may be due to the perceived risks associated with holding...

Among the different cultural heritage assets, genetic resources (GR) and traditional knowledge associated to them (TK) have a technical character and enjoy legal protection in the international law. Due to these characteristics, measures of patent law have been often considered for their...

As of 2016, 80% of the products sold in Nigeria were counterfeits and as of today, it is quite doubtful that the percentage of counterfeit and illegal goods in circulation has decreased below 50%. According to a report from Frontier Economics in 2017, which was based on an earlier report of 2016...

“Trademarks are signs that identify goods or services offered on a market. Trademarks are nothing new. For example, Ancient Greeks and Romans stamped or inscribed on various groups an identifying symbol or name. Today the trademark is a way to attract the public. Consumers look at trademarks...

The intersection of the fields of Intellectual Property Law (IPL) and Environmental Law (EL) is a multi-dimensional space requiring consideration not only of specialized areas and topics within each of these fields, but also of general law principles and a variety of approaches to analysis and...

Authority for national judiciaries to issue permanent and preliminary injunctions is required by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), Articles 44 and 50. But the TRIPS Agreement does not require the issuance of injunctions in any particular...

The importance of intellectual property rights (IPRs) for innovation has grown and the protection of intellectual property in international trade has also been strengthened. AI-related patent applications have been increasing rapidly and many AI patents are being filed in various industries....

This article provides a novel explanation for the global intellectual property (IP) paradox, i.e. the consistent growth of the multilateral IP system in spite of mounting evidence that its effects are at best neutral if not disadvantageous for low-income and most middle-income countries and thus...

This paper examines three sets of explanations for variations in the strength of patent protection across sixty countries and a 150-year period. Wealthier nations are more likely to have patent systems, to allow patentees a longer time to put their patents into practice, and to ratify treaties...

Computer networks are widely used in digital work across the globe, and easy access to the world wide web has led to widespread information of all the digital form sectors. In digital form, such abundance of information has given so many benefits to the countries such as publishing, creating,...

In 1995, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission adopted new guidelines for those wishing to license intellectual property rights without violating antitrust laws. Designed to provide clarity, these guidelines instead breed confusion because they misunderstand the nature of...

This paper focuses on the innovative actions of entrepreneurs, namely their tendency to reveal the intellectual capital that results from their research efforts either in the form of public knowledge (publications) or private knowledge (patents). Using data collected by the National Research...

A patent only protects an innovator from others producing the same product, but it does not protect him from others producing better products under new patents. Therefore, one may divide up the source of competition facing an innovator into within-patent competition, which results from...

This Chapter addresses the topic of intellectual property (IP) exhaustion in the context of the parallel trade of pharmaceuticals. These imports, which are controversial in general, are more complex with respect to pharmaceuticals, which require additional marketing and import authorizations....

In this Statement, the authors take a position on the waiver of intellectual property (IP) protection currently being considered by the members of the World Trade Organisation. The waiver was initiated by India and South Africa as a measure to enable rapid access to affordable medical products...

India and South Africa approached World Trade Organization (WTO) to negotiate the temporary waiver of Intellectual Property (IP) rights on COVID-19 vaccines to remove the artificial barrier of patents and boost vaccine production. This commentary advocates for the waiver of IP rights on COVID-19...

To augment the global production and distribution of Covid-19 medical products such as vaccines, drugs and other therapeutics, countries are negotiating for temporarily waiving certain provisions of the TRIPS agreement at the WTO. Depending on the conditions that would govern the waiver,...

With the aim of strengthening the economic integration to liberalize trade and investment among members, 12 countries in the Pacific Rim including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam came together under a FTA...

The trickle of business method patents issued by the United States Patent Office became a flood after the State Street Bank decision in 1998. Many scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decision itself. This paper discusses the likely impact...

This paper examines the suggestion that established plaintiffs request preliminary injunctions to engage in predation against less financially healthy firms. We first present a model in which differences in litigation costs drive the use of preliminary injunctions in civil litigation. The...

I study the short- and long-term effects of regional trade agreements (RTA) with strict intellectual property (IP) provisions. An empirical analysis using gravity methods suggests that regions signing these agreements share more technology in the form of technology licensing following the year...

The paper seeks to understand the impact of the patent system on innovation by examining shifts in the strength of patent protection across sixty countries and a 150-year period. An examination of 177 policy changes reveals that strengthening patent protection appears to have few positive...