Crop research has undergone a major transformation in North America and many other parts of the word. The introduction of biotechnology and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) alter the nature of research products, which in turn changes the structure of the agricultural research industry from perfectly competitive to imperfectly competitive. The implications of these changes are not fully understood. The objective of this thesis is to develop a broader understanding of how biotechnology, changes in IPRs and the resulting changes in industry structure have affected private and public incentives for agricultural research. The specific goals include development of an analytical framework to examine the incentives for private R&D expenditure, and the spillovers between basic and applied research and between private and public firms. To achieve the objective of this study, a stochastic analytical model within an imperfect competitive framework was developed. Specifically, what is developed is a three-stage search/imperfect competition model characterized by two research firms developing and selling differentiated products to producers who are heterogeneous with respect to some attributes. Agricultural research is modeled with explicit recognition of the search process, which allows us to recognize research as a stochastic process with sporadic outcomes and to explicitly model the interaction between basic and applied research. The findings of this study are mainly in the form of propositions. It was shown that basic public research "crowds in" applied private research while applied public research "crowds out" applied private research. The current technology level and the cost of the experimentation negatively affect private investment, while the price of the final product positively affects the private investment. Moreover, it is concluded that, the greater the product heterogeneity, the higher the price charged with the same amount of R&D. Finally, it is shown that the increase in IPR's and the firm's market size has a positive effect on the private firm's amount of R&D investment. The econometric analysis, using data from the canola industry, provides empirical evidence to support the analytical framework and the proposition derived in this study. The study also draws a number of policy implications from the derived propositions.

<p>This research investigates the nature of the social project surrounding the lawsuit between the organic farmers of Saskatchewan, Canada, and Monsanto and Bayer, the two largest biotechnology companies in Canada. The thesis also explores the culture of organic farming in an era of high technology and globalization. An ethnographic approach is employed in order to address this research aim from the perspective of study participants. Based on interview data, I detail the difficulties facing farmers, especially small organic farmers, in Canada today. I also describe a hope and determination amongst organic farmers who see themselves resisting the erosion of the rural landscape at the hands of powerful corporations and a dominant industrial model of food production. In the end, the organic farmers of Saskatchewan are recognized as part of a broad, coalitional and embryonic new social movement whose lifeworld, or cultural, focus reflects the post-modern character of contemporary society and presents some interesting challenges for social science.</p>

Behovet av att skydda sig mot plagiat har blivit allt viktigare. Med dagens snabba kommunikation och höga teknologisk standard, kan en mer eller mindre liknade eller exakt kopia vara på marknaden efter endast några få dagar. Den som plagierar sparar både tid och pengar. Att formge en tilltalande produkt, tar tid och kostar pengar, vilket gör att den som kopiera utnyttjar det någon annan formgivit och det arbete den gjort. Dessutom sparar den som kopierar mycket tid på att inte behöva marknadsföra produkten. De skydd som finns för produktens form och design, ges genom immaterialrätt som omfattar upphovsrätten patent, varukännetecken samt mönster - eller formgivningsskydd. Alternativ för den som ”bara” vill göra känt att man formgivit något är Svensk Forms Nyhetsregister. I uppsatsen redovisas några produkter som har blivit plagierade. Resultatet av dessa vissa att det är svårt för en mindre formgivare att skydda sin design. / The need of protection against plagiarism has become more important in the last few years.Develeopment of the internet means that a product similar the one you have made can be on the market in a few days. They who make use of plagiarism saves both time and money. That means that a company that uses plagiarism take advantage of the originator who made the product from the beginning. Another benefit that a company that are use plagiarism gets is that they dont need to pay money för marketing of the product. There are both legal and agreed for a products design. These means gives protection for a product and help the founder to get credit for the innovation. An alternative for a person that just wants to present that he or she is the founder is The Swedish Forms new Registration. In the paper a few observed cases of plagiarism has been examined. The result of these cases shows that it is difficult for a small person who has created a product to defend his product against plagiarism. This is due often due to lack of knowledge, expensive legal proceedings and insufficient global watch.

Under slutet av 1800-talet kom Pariskonventionen att förändra synen på patentoch en era av multilateralt samarbete kom att inledas.Med anledning av utvecklingen på den europeiska patentmarknaden har sedanmitten av 1900-talet betydande harmoniserande förändringar genomförts. Ettgemensamt patentsystem inom EU har dock ännu inte blivit verklighet.Svensk patenträtt har över tiden kommit att närma sig den europeiska, vilket är ettexempel på det arbete som pågår inom Europa. Inom den svenska rätten är Patentlagenav stor betydelse då internationella avtalsbestämmelser kommit att inkorporerasi denna lag.Även om ett nordiskt samarbete funnits sedan länge är det den europeiska patentkonventionentillsammans med det europeiska patentkontoret som utgjort det mestbetydelsefulla resultatet av samarbetet inom den europeiska patenträtten. I slutetav år 2009 nåddes en politisk överenskommelse gällande ett gemenskapspatentoch en gemensam patentdomstol inom EU. Huruvida denna överenskommelsekommer att utmynna i något nytt patent eller någon ny patentdomstol är dockännu oklart. Bland annat väntas ett avgörande från EG-domstolen.Det har argumenterats för att ett nytt patentsystem skulle kunna innebära ett merkostnadseffektivt och smidigt patentsystem inom EU. Samtidigt försvåras fråganslösning av de många olika viljor som finns då ett så övergripande samarbete är förhanden. Språkliga problem har varit betydande och komplicerat debatten.Vilka för- och nackdelar som skulle kunna följa av ett nytt patentsystem behandlasi denna uppsats för att svara på frågan om det verkligen behövs ett gemensamtpatentsystem inom EU. Trots de svårigheter som omgärdar frågan ställer sigmånga av de europeiska länderna positivt till ett ökat samarbete. Exakt hur dettasamarbete ska se ut har dock varit den stora frågan.Enligt min uppfattning finns det behov av ytterligare samarbete och fler förbättringarinom den europeiska patenträtten.

Upphovsrätten har den senaste tiden varit ett av de mest omdiskuterade juridiska områdena. Dagens lagstiftning ger upphovsmäns prestationer skydd under hela upphovsmannens livstid plus i ytterligare 70 år medan en utövande musikers prestation endast skyddas i 50 år. En utövande musiker har således inte samma starka skydd som en upphovsman. EU-kommissionen har emellertid lagt fram ett förslag på förändring av de regler som omfattar just de utövande musikerna. Syftet med denna uppsats är att diskutera om det finns ett behov av ett utökat skydd för utövande musiker. Vidare kommer vi att diskutera huruvida förslaget är en lämplig lösning för att uppnå ett starkare skydd för de utövande musikernas förevigade prestationer.

In the past several years, the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on access to medicines and medical technologies has come under increased scrutiny. Motivating this are highly publicized cases where IPRs appear the threaten access to particular medicines and diagnostics. As IPRs become globalized, so does the controversy: In 1998, nearly forty pharmaceutical companies filed a lawsuit against South Africa, citing (among other issues) deprivation of intellectual property. This followed South Africa’s implementation of various measures to enable and encourage the use of generic medicines – a move that was particularly controversial for the newly available (and still patented) HIV medicines. While many historical, legal, economic, and policy analyses of these cases and issues exist, few explicitly normative projects have been undertaken. This thesis utilizes interdisciplinary and explicitly normative philosophical methods to fill this normative void, engaging theoretical work on intellectual property and global distributive justice with each other, and with empirical work on IPR reform. In doing so, it explicitly rejects three mistaken assumptions about the debate over IPRs and access to essential medicines: (i) that this debate reduces to a disagreement about empirical facts; (ii) that intellectual property is normatively justified solely by its ability to “maximize innovation”; and (iii) that this controversy reduces to irresolvable disagreement about global distributive justice. Calling upon the best contemporary approaches to human rights, it argues that these approaches lend normative weight in favor of reforming IPRs – both that they should be reformed, and how – to better enable access to essential medicines. Such reforms might include modifying the present global IPR regime or creating new alternatives to the exclusivity of IPRs, both of which are considered in light of a human right to access to essential medicines. Future work will be needed, however, to better specify the content of a right to “essential medicines” and determine a fair distribution of the costs of fulfilling it. / Dissertation

The general motivation behind my research interests is a desire to find ways of harnessing the system of Japan¡¦s Intellectual Property Trust and Technology Transfer . The majority of my research work has focused on the development and validation of Secondary Data Analysis¡BHistorical trend research method and Induction research methods used to address Japan's Intellectual Property Trust system. My initial research focus was on Japan's Intellectual Property Trust system after 1980's Japan-US trade friction and after revised Trust Business Law in 2004. My thesis is committed to exploring the Japan¡¦s Intellectual Property Trust and Technology Transfer system, this thesis is divided into five chapters, to explore the Intellectual Property Trust and Technology Transfer system between Taiwan and Japan, to explain how the Japanese government actively utilize the economic benefits of Technology Licensing Organization¡BIntellectual Property Trust and Technology Transfer, active innovation expertise and knowledge production mode, and by the proposed University of Tokyo and Tsukuba University case study to explore the planning of the legal system under the current system in Taiwan. Therefore, the future of Taiwan's technology transfer organization is faced with strengthening its function and transformation, in addition to proper management of intellectual property rights. Thus Taiwan government must achieve its objectives of utilizing the intellectual property trust model. While Taiwan today is facing the opportunity of the reform of intellectual property rights of thinking, she should not overlook the effectiveness of his country.

Abstract Presently, IC is an important and absolutely necessary product that the thriving electronic industry is relying on in order to continue its development, therefore, it goes without saying that it is very important. In addition, the intellectual property right possessed by the IC itself is related to the development and progress of the industry technology. Therefore, in the early period, many countries and international organizations already enacted law to protect the intellectual property right of IC. In addition, the legislature protection on the intellectual property right of the integrated circuit was originated from the ¡uProtection of Semiconductor Chip Products¡vof United States. Thereafter, through the provision of the mutual benefit terms and its strong trading strength, United States influenced various countries like Japan, Taiwan and Mainland China to enact laws consecutively for the purpose of protection. Furthermore, between international countries, due to the importance of IC and the strength of United States, there were related treaties to protect the intellectual property right of IC. Amongst these the most important treaty was the ¡uAgreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)¡vestablished by the World Trade Organization (WTO). It replaced the ¡uthe Treaty on Intellectual Property in respect of Integrated Circuits (IPIC)¡v stipulated by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and became the only international treaty with protection provision on the intellectual property right of IC. Up to this stage, the legal protection on the intellectual property right of IC has already become an international trend. Moreover, due to the long-time shut-off condition in Mainland China, only after it was re-opened again, its economy started to develop. With its own vast market and the advantage of low production cost, added with the full effort of encouragement on the development of IC industry by the Mainland China authority that stipulated many relative favorable policies, many international IC enterprises were attracted to invest in Mainland China. Of course, without exception, IC enterprise of Taiwan also went to set up factories in Mainland China. However, as Mainland China was at a shut-off condition for a long time, therefore related laws and regulations were not complete. Thereafter due to the practical pressure of international countries, Mainland China further established the ¡uIC Layout Drawing Design Protection Regulation¡v. However, as the development of the intellectual property right law was comparatively late, it resulted in failure in the performance of law execution. Therefore, it was extremely easy for the IC enterprises that went to invest in Mainland China to encounter infringement of intellectual property right and of course this also included enterprise of Taiwan, the trend of legal protection on the IC intellectual property right between United States and international countries is utilized to examine the protection structure of the intellectual property right of IC of Mainland China. The purpose is to understand when the international IC enterprise is developing in Mainland China, how it can utilize related legal protection structure to establish a set of its own intellectual property right protection system. Furthermore, suggestion on appropriate protection on the intellectual property right is presented to our IC enterprise in Mainland China so that the intellectual property right of our IC enterprise in Mainland China can obtain sufficient protection.

With the approach of the era of digital TV system around the world, how to grasp the design techniques of the receiver of the DVB-T has become a very important topic. The goal of this thesis is to pursue a highly optimized VLSI architecture compatible to the channel decoding standard of the DVB-T protocol. The channel decoding scheme adopted in DVB-T is based on the concatenated code; which is comprised of an inner Viterbi decoder, outer Reed-Solomon decoder and inner and outer de-interleaver modules. These modules all require a significant amount of data storage space, therefore the main feature of the proposed channel decoder architectures is to realize the data storage based on RAM instead of registers. This approach can lead to the reduction of silicon area and the dynamic power dissipation compared with the shift register based architecture. In order to achieve this, in the design of Viterbi module, the popular register-exchange and trace-back techniques used for the detection of the survivor path has been combined for the survivor memory management unit. As for the design of Reed-Solomon decoder, it is designed based on the modified inverse-free Berlekamp-Massey algorithm. A novel finite field constant multiplier architecture has been proposed which can reduce the required gate count of the multipliers by 20%. For outer convolutional deinterleaver, a specific address generator has been designed such that the data deinterleaver path can be merged and implemented as two memory blocks. For inner symbol deinterleaver, a lookahead technique has been applied to the design of address generator and deinterleaver memory has been reduced by a half compared with those in the literature. These four modules have been verified and integrated as robust channel decoder silicon IP. The related models used for IP integration and verification have also been provided. The prototyping on the FPGA has been tested to satisfy the requirement of the spec.

In the high-speed indoor wireless applications, IEEE 802.11 series is the most dominating LAN standard in the current markets. In this thesis, the design issues of the IEEE 802.11a physical layer baseband system are addressed. Various key modules including Viterbi codec, FFT/IFFT module, OFDM synchronous circuit have been integrated with several other modules to constitute the entire baseband system. This system has been implemented by Verilog HDL and verified against with the C-based behavior model. In addition, it will also be prototyped and optimized on the Altera DSP FPGA Development Board. The transmission of the I, Q channel for the time domain singal is emulated by using the 10-bits AD/DA modules on the FPGA board. The experimental results shows that the gate counts of the transmitter and the receiver are 81,190 and 413,461 respectively.