intellectual property

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.

This paper examines whether the publication behavior of academic inventors (at K.U. Leuven) differs from their colleagues (non-inventors) working within similar fields of research. According to the authors, their analysis reveals that inventors publish significantly more. Moreover, no empirical evidence was found for the ‘skewing problem’. These findings not only suggest the co-existence of both activities; they may actually reinforce each other.

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 paper uses a new data set of the trade mark activity of UK manufacturing and service sector firms (1996-2000) to investigate the market value of trade marks. Data on both trade (and service) marks sought via the UK Patent Office (UKTM) and the European Community Office for Harmonisation of the Internal Market (CTM) are available. The results indicate that stock market values are positively associated with R&D and trade mark activity by firms.

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.

By using the PatVal-EU dataset , the authors find that the most important determinant of patent licensing is firm size. Patent breadth, value, protection, and other factors suggested by the literature also have an impact, but not as important, they conclude.

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.

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 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.

This paper surveys the literature on university patenting. From the point of view of the economic theory
of patents, it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical:
patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights,
but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme, i.e., they receive public funds to perform
socially useful knowledge.