intellectual property

According to the authors, open source style of software development remedies a defect of intellectual property protection, namely, that it does not generally require or encourage disclosure of source code. The authors review a considerable body of survey evidence and theory that seeks to explain why developers participate in open source collaborations instead of keeping their code proprietary, and evaluates the extent to which open source may improve welfare compared to proprietary development.

The authors give a quantitative assessment of current
intellectual property (IP) policies. They focus particularly on the scale of the market, showing that as it increases, due either to growth or to the expansion of trade,
IP protection should be reduced.

According to the author, empirical and theoretical findings bearing on the question of IPRs’ effect on technological development, and thus prospect for economic development, are reviewed.

This paper provides evidence from a newly constructed database of UK firms about the extent of their intellectual property acquisition activities over five years. The authors focus on service sector firms, which have not previously been studied, with comparisons for firms in manufacturing and other sectors, such as agriculture. The analysis includes patents and trade marks applied for via both the UK and European routes.

The authors analyze the extent to which patent pools (agreements where patent holders agree to license their intellectual property as a package) could be used as an institution to facilitate technology transactions in biotechnology.

This study aims to give a first insight in the ways and procedures used by Belgian Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) to protect the results of hard and often pioneering research work. The main topics addressed in this study concern the way of organising the TTO service within the university, the adopted policies and procedures, the method of prior art search and a indication of the cost structure through subventions and cost participation by departments and third parties.

The paper attempts a critical assessment of both the theory and the empirical evidence on the role of appropriability and in particular of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) as incentives for technological innovation. The authors start with a critical discussion of the standard justification of the attribution of IPR in terms of "market failures" in knowledge generation. Such an approach we argue misses important features of technological knowledge and also neglects the importance of non-market institutions in the innovation process.

This paper investigates how the mode of entry into a
foreign market can be influenced by the intensity of R&D in an industry and the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in a recipient country. It then analyzes the link between the IPR regime and policies that place limits on the degree of foreign ownership in a joint venture. The paper concludes that host countries never finds it optimal to fully protect IPRs and concede all bargaining power in a joint venture to the foreign firm.

This paper assesses the impact of adopting a post-grant
review institution in the US patent system by comparing the opposition careers of European Patent Office (EPO) equivalents of litigated US patents to those of a control group of EPO patents. Our results provide strong evidence that the United States could benefit substantially from adopting an administrative post-grant patent review, provided that the post-grant mechanism is not too costly.

Licensing a new technology implies introducing competition into the market. The authors hypothesize that the introduction of a competitor into the market may enhance demand, and consequently have a positive effect for the incumbent firm. They then show that an incumbent may decide to license a technology even in the absence of a royalty when the positive effect outweighs the negative one.