Η συμφωνία TRIPS, υπό την ομπρέλα του Παγκόσμιου Οργανισμού Εμπορίου και εξυπηρετώντας τα συμφέροντα που την εμπνεύστηκαν και την επέβαλαν, συνέδεσε για πρώτη φορά την πνευματική ιδιοκτησία με το εμπόριο και έθεσε τα ελάχιστα επίπεδα για την προστασία της, συμπεριλαμβανομένου του τομέα των πατεντών στα φαρμακευτικά προϊόντα και τις διαδικασίες παραγωγής τους. Στην παρούσα εργασία, αφού αναλυθούν τα βασικότερα άρθρα που αφορούν στην προστασία των πατεντών και των αποτελεσμάτων δοκιμών, οι «TRIPS flexibilities», οι προσπάθειες περιορισμού του πεδίου εφαρμογής τους, σκιαγραφείται η νέα τάξη πραγμάτων που διαμορφώνεται κάτω από τις πιέσεις των κυρίαρχων συμφερόντων για πιο επεκτατική και αυστηρή προστασία της πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας. Οι επιπτώσεις της TRIPS και των διμερών και περιφερειακών TRIPS-plus συμφωνιών στην πρόσβαση στα φάρμακα, περιγράφονται υπό το πρίσμα της διαμόρφωσης των τιμών τους και της αδυναμίας να καλυφθεί το χάσμα χρηματοδότησης R&D για ασθένειες που πλήττουν το 90% του παγκόσμιου πληθυσμού (10/90 gap), παρά τις προς του αντιθέτου υποσχέσεις του ανεπτυγμένου κόσμου. Συμπεραίνουμε ότι το μοντέλο “one-size-fits-all” για την προστασία της πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας, παραβλέπει τις διαφορετικές ανάγκες και δομές κάθε κοινωνίας και ενισχύει τις ανισότητες του πλανήτη. Οι προτάσεις μας συντείνουν στην αναγκαιότητα ανάληψης συντονισμένων δράσεων εκ μέρους των κυβερνήσεων των κρατών, των διεθνών οργανισμών, της επιστημονικής κοινότητας και των πολιτών ώστε το αναπαλλοτρίωτο ανθρώπινο δικαίωμα στη ζωή και την υγεία, να τύχει του σεβασμού που του αξίζει. / --

The objectives of this study were to establish various practices of indigenous knowledge (IK) commonly used in the Dlangubo village, and methods and tools used in managing IK; to determine ownership protocols and what they know about the South African (SA) intellectual property (IP) laws; to explore the role of libraries and information and communication technologies (ICTs) in managing IK and, lastly, what model can be developed for the management of IK in the Dlangubo village, in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa. In order to gain more insight about the problem studied, the socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation (SECI) model of knowledge management and the diffusion of innovation (DoI) model were adopted. The SECI model helped in understanding the modes of knowledge creation and transfer that were used in managing IK in the area of study. The DoI model was important in understanding the perceptions of the community about the South African intellectual property (IP) laws, the libraries and the ICTs in managing IK. This study used the constructivist theoretical underpinning and adopted the qualitative approach in order to inquire in depth and explore the studied phenomenon in the natural setting of the Dlangubo village. This approach allowed the researcher to engage in an in-depth interviewing process with the participants in order to explore IK management challenges and then get empirical evidence about the area studied. Flowing from the qualitative approach, the grounded theory (GT) was adopted because it uses the systematic inductive approach to inquiry followed by a constant comparison of categories in order to generate theory, which is grounded in data of the sampled participants of the Dlangubo village The findings of the study indicated that the practices that were predominantly used in the area of study included agricultural crop farming and livestock keeping, the initiation of girls into adulthood and beadwork. The in-situ preservation strategies were more common than the ex-situ preservation strategies. Most of the respondents indicated that they acquired IK through apprenticeship of family line. The majority did not have knowledge or had insufficient knowledge about the South African IP laws. In addition, they were not using the libraries and the ICTs in managing their IK. The model that was recommended was to have the cultural information centre where they can sit together and share their IK and skills, and market their finished products. / Information Science / D. Litt. et Phil. (Information Science)

This study engages in an ethical examination of contemporary socio-ecological and economic issues which takes seriously the plight of Africa, African communities, indigenous knowledge and biodiversity. It studies the impact of bioprospecting, biopiracy and intellectual property rights regimes on the protection, use, access to, and conservation of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge in Africa. The study also examines the ways in which northern multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and their agents prospect and convert African resources (biological commons and indigenous knowledge) into their intellectual property as well as private property. It argues that the transfer of African biological commons and indigenous knowledge is exacerbated by economic globalisation and the neo-colonial mentality of conquest concealed under the guise of commerce. The study demonstrates through concrete case studies the tactics used by northern multinational corporations to claim these resources as their intellectual property rights and private property. It observes that the privatisation of biological commons and indigenous knowledge only brings about nominal or no benefits to African communities who have nurtured and continue to nurture them. It also observes that this privatisation results in fewer benefits for biodiversity as they lead to the promotion of monoculture, i.e. commercialisation of all things. To address the injustice and exploitative implications of bioprospecting, biopiracy and intellectual property rights, the study recommends the adoption and implementation of the African model law, the establishment of defensive intellectual property rights mechanisms, and the strategy of resistance and advocacy. It suggests that these measures ought to be grounded on the African normative principle of botho and the Christian ethical principle of justice. / Systematic Theology and Theological Ethics / D.Th.(Theological Ethics)

The Law of Technological Innovation established the obligation of Institutions of Science and Technology (ICTs) has a Center for Technological Innovation (NIT) to manage its innovation policy. The creation of NITs resulted in the growth of the number of requests for protection of Intellectual Property (IP) derived from Brazilian universities. The Federal University of Reconcavo of Bahia (UFRB), despite having existed Coordination of Science and Technological Innovation in 2006 and an NIT since 2007, its innovation policy was not enhanced enough to strengthen the culture of IP protection in technology transfer (TT) and the approach the University with the industrial sector. This study aimed to map and proposes strategies to enhance the protection of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer (IP&TT) in UFRB. Thus, we carried out a literature survey to identify strategies already used by other institutions, desk research to identify the strategies adopted by UFRB to consolidate its innovation policy, a survey of scientific and technological production to develop indicators that production and identify their potential in Research, Development and Innovation, and finally, the application of semi-structured interviews with managers UFRB to analyze the perception of these managers on innovation policy of the University. It was found that the UFRB scientificize has a production of 407 publications (between 2006 and 2012) and a technological production of 11 patents in the National Institute of Industrial Property that period. On its policy of innovation, UFRB tries to establish it since 2006, but has trouble finding its intensification as, for example, lack of trained human resources, the difficulty of inserting a culture of protection of IP rights among academics and the gap with the business sector. Whereas the number of projects covered by the Scholarship Program Started in Technological Development and Innovation (PIBITI) reached 56 and the defenses of dissertations and theses reached the number of 252 performances, UFRB has a scientific productivity that has not been protected by IP rights and could have resulted in many products, processes or services with innovative potential. In 2014, despite the creation of the Coordination of Creation and Innovation (CINOVA), is additionally necessary to adopt other strategies to strengthen innovation policy at the University such as the creation of a Commission of IP&TT; expansion in the number of servers and; actions to enhance the culture of IP&TT between academics and businesses; the inclusion, at undergraduate and postgraduate, discussions on IP rights and; monitoring of projects with innovative potential. / A Lei de Inovação Tecnológica estabeleceu a obrigatoriedade das Instituições de Ciência e Tecnologia (ICTs) dispor de um Núcleo de Inovação Tecnológica (NIT) para gerir sua política de inovação. A criação dos NITs resultou no crescimento do número de pedidos de proteção da Propriedade Intelectual (PI) proveniente de universidades brasileiras. Na Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB), apesar de ter existido a Coordenação de Ciência e Inovação Tecnológica já em 2006 e um NIT desde 2007, sua política de inovação não foi intensificada o suficiente para fortalecer a cultura de proteção da PI, de transferência de tecnologia (TT) e a aproximação da Universidade com o setor industrial. O presente estudo teve como objetivo mapear e propor estratégias para intensificar a proteção da Propriedade Intelectual e a Transferência de Tecnologia (PI&TT) na UFRB. Dessa forma, fez-se um levantamento bibliográfico para identificar estratégias já utilizadas por outras instituições, uma pesquisa documental para identificar as estratégias adotadas pela UFRB para consolidar sua política de inovação, um levantamento de sua produção científica e tecnológica para elaborar indicadores dessa produção e identificar seu potencial em Pesquisa, Desenvolvimento e Inovação e, por fim, a aplicação de entrevistas semiestruturadas com gestores da UFRB para analisar a percepção desses gestores sobre a política de inovação da Universidade. Verificou-se que a UFRB tem uma produção cientificar de 407 publicações (entre 2006 e 2012) e uma produção tecnológica de 11 patentes depositadas no Instituto Nacional de Propriedade Industrial nesse período. Sobre sua política de inovação, a UFRB tenta estabelecê-la desde 2006, mas vem encontrando problemas para sua intensificação como, por exemplo, a falta de recursos humanos capacitados, a dificuldade de inserir uma cultura de proteção dos direitos de PI entre os acadêmicos e o distanciamento com o setor empresarial. Considerando que o número de projetos contemplados pelo Programa Institucional de Bolsas de Iniciação em Desenvolvimento Tecnológico e Inovação (PIBITI) chegou a 56 e as defesas de dissertações e teses atingiu o número de 252 apresentações, a UFRB tem uma produtividade científica que não tem sido protegida por direitos de PI e poderia ter resultado em muitos produtos, processos ou serviços com potencial inovador. Em, 2014, apesar da criação da Coordenação de Criação e Inovação (CINOVA), adicionalmente é preciso adotar outras estratégias para fortalecer a política de inovação na Universidade como: a criação de uma Comissão de PI&TT; ampliação do quadro de servidores e; ações para intensificar a cultura de PI&TT entre os acadêmicos e empresas; a inclusão, na graduação e na pós-graduação, de discussões sobre direitos de PI e; acompanhamento dos projetos com potencial inovador.

This thesis aims to look at the agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) with specific reference to their impact on South Africa's ability to combat HIV and AIDS. It begins by looking at the history of patents and intellectual property rights and illustrates why and how the TRIPS Agreement came into existence. The TRIPS Agreement exemplifies the disparities between developed and developing countries and this can clearly be seen with regard to the provision of anti-HIV and AIDS drugs. The developing world deals with the bulk of the HIV and AIDS epidemic whilst the developed world holds most of the patents on the medication needed to treat those living with HIV and AIDS. This situation lends itself to a rift between patient rights on the one hand, and patent rights on the other. Traditionally the state has been the provider of rights such as health, but TRIPS alters this to include strong patent protection that is in line with neo liberal doctrine. The thesis examines these tensions with specific reference to South Africa's ability successfully to implement programmes to combat HIV and AIDS.

Le droit des entreprises en difficulté est une branche du droit qui se place au carrefour de disciplines juridiques aussi différentes que difficilement compatibles entre elles. Régulièrement, l'ouverture d'une procédure collective touche des droits de propriété intellectuelle représentant une importante part de l'actif des entreprises quels que soient le secteur concerné et la propriété intellectuelle en cause. Cette période donne naissance à multiples conflits d'intérêts, les conceptions qui s'y opposent bien souvent antagonistes reflètent les difficultés liées au chevauchement entre les mécanismes propres aux droits de propriété intellectuelle et ceux du droit des procédures collectives. Le droit de la défaillance des entreprises se révèle « complexe » la recherche d'un équilibre n'est pas aisée, et se traduit par une « cohabitation difficile ». L'analyse des interactions entre le droit des entreprises en difficulté et les droit de propriété intellectuelle, a permis de démêler l'enchevêtrement issu des querelles de frontières entre ces deux droits. / Bankruptcy proceedings law is a branch of law that combines different legal disciplines that as different as hardly compatible with each other. More often than not, the initiation of collective proceedings affects intellectual property rights which represent a significant part of the assets of companies whatever the sector and whatever the undertakings irrespective of the sector concerned and whatever the intellectual property in question. This period gives rise to multiple conflicts of interest insofar as the opposing views reflect the difficulties related to the overlap between the mechanisms that are specific to intellectual property rights and those that are specific to Bankruptcy proceedings law. Bankruptcy law turns out to be "complex" insofar finding out a balance is not easy and reflects in a "difficult cohabitation". The analysis of the interactions between bankruptcy law and intellectual property rights helped avoiding the entanglement that resulted from border disputes between these two legal disciplines.

"Zimbabwe and South Africa are facing an HIV/AIDS epidemic of such proportions that the populations of these countries will markedly decline in the next ten years despite the existence of effective drugs to treat the symptoms of AIDS and dramatically lower the communicability of the virus. These drugs are under patent protection by companies in the developed world and the patents raise the prices above the level of affordability for HIV infected persons in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has declared a national emergency on HIV/AIDS, apparently in conformance with TRIPS and has issued compulsory licenses to a local company that has started to manufacture and sell cheap anti-retroviral drugs. South Africa has not declared a national emergency and has not invoked the TRIPS flexibilities or utilized flexibilities inherent in its own legislation. However, while thousands of people die every week in the two countries, neither government has yet provided an effective HIV/AIDS policy. Extensive litigation and public pressure in South Africa has led the government to announce a policy of supplying free HIV drugs in public hospitals while the Zimbabwean government has announced the provision of the same drugs, also in public hospitals, apparently utilising the state of emergency. The TRIPS agreement under which the two governments undertook to protect international patents allows compulsory licensing under certain circumstances (not limited to a national emergency) and the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health, and subsequent agreements by the Ministerial Council of the WTO allow the manufacture and, in limited circumstances, the parallel importation of generic drugs. These provisions provide a theoretical mechanism for poor countries to ensure their citizens' rights of access to health (care). The research is aimed at identifying the extent of the effectiveness of the legal norms created by Articles 20 and 31 of TRIPS, the Doha Declaration and subsequent Council of Ministers' decisions, which together ostensibly provide a framework to allow provision of generic drugs. It is further aimed at investigating how the state of emergency in Zimbabwe has been utilised to provide cheap generic drugs to Zimbabweans and whether this would be an option for South Africa. A comparison of the legal provisions governing the provision of drugs in the two countries will also be undertaken to examine the extent to which international and national constitutional and legal provisions may be utilised to give effect to the right to health." -- Introduction. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2004. / Prepared under the supervision of Dr. Enid Hill at the American University in Cairo. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/academic_pro/llm1/dissertations.html / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

"The thesis of this study is that the flexibility within the exceptions to patent rights protecton under the TRIPS Agreement has not sufficiently been exploited at the national level. The study conceptualises the regimes for the protection of the right to health and IPRs not as mutually exclusive but as potentially reinforcing. The contention is therefore that the obligations in respect to the right to health limit the manner in which states can exercise the flexibilty within the patent regime of the TRIPS Agreement. Eventually the study seeks to answer the question: Where does the guarantee for the right to health lie in light of the TRIPS regime? ... The study is divided into three chapters preceded by an introduction. The introduction lays the background for te discussion. Chapter one deals with the definition of important concepts and provides the context in which the study is set. The chapter also discusses the background to the creation of the TRIPS Agreement, with an emphatic discussion on the involvement or lack thereof of Africn and other least developed and developing countries in this process. Chapter two discusses the patent rights exceptions clause under the TRIPS Agreement. Against this background, compuslory licensing, government use and parallel importing as means of making accessibility to drugs a reality under the TRIPS Agreement will be discussed. Chapter three identifies other means of making drugs more accessible and identifying places where they have worked well. In this chapter, generic substitution, establishemnt of a pricing committee, therapeutic value pricing, pooled procurement, negotiated procurement and planned donations will be discussed. Finally a conclusion will be drawn from the discussion and recommendations will be advanced." -- Chapter 1. / Prepared under the supervision of Riekie Wandrag at the Community Law Centre, University of Western Cape, South Africa / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2002. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/academic_pro/llm1/dissertations.html / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

1. The context: The European patent system has been affected by substantial changes over the past three decades, which have raised vigorous debates at different levels. The main objective of the present dissertation is to contribute to these debates through an exploratory analysis of different changes in patenting practices – in particular the way applications are drafted and filed to patent offices –, their drivers, association with the value of patents, and potential impact on the patent system. The coming essays are therefore empirical in their essence, but are inspired by economic motivations and concerns. Their originality is threefold: it resides in the novelty of the main questions discussed, the comprehensive database specifically built to address them, and the range of statistical methods used for this purpose. The main argument throughout these pages is that patenting practices have significantly evolved in the past decades and that these developments have affected the patent system and could compromise its ability to fulfil its economic purpose. The economic objective of patents is to encourage innovation and its diffusion through the public disclosure of the inventions made. But their exploitation in the knowledge economy has assumed so many different forms that inventors have supposedly developed new patenting and filing strategies to deal with these market conditions or reap the maximum benefits from their patents. The present thesis aims at better understanding the dimensions, determinants, and some potential consequences of these developing practices.<p><p>2. The evolution: Chapter 2 presents a detailed descriptive analysis of the evolution in the size of patent applications filed to the European Patent Office (EPO). In this chapter, we propose two measures of patent voluminosity and identify the main patterns in their evolution. Based on a dataset with about 2 million documents filed at the EPO, the results show that the average voluminosity of patent applications – measured in terms of the number of pages and claims contained in each document – has doubled over the past 25 years. Nevertheless, this evolution varies widely across countries, technologies and filing procedures chosen by the applicant. This increasing voluminosity of filings has a strong impact on the workload of the EPO, which justifies the need for regulatory and policy actions.<p><p>3. The drivers: The evolution in patent voluminosity observed in chapter 2 calls for a multivariate analysis of its determinants. Chapter 3 therefore proposes and tests 4 different hypotheses that may contribute to explaining the observed inflation in size: the influence of national laws and practices and their diffusion to other countries with the progressive globalization of patenting procedures, the complexification of research activities and inventions, the emergence of new sectors with less established norms and vocabularies, and the construction of patent portfolios. The econometric results first reveal that the four hypotheses are significantly associated with longer documents and are therefore empirically supported. It appears however that the first hypothesis – the diffusion of national drafting practices through international patenting procedures – is the strongest contributor of all, resulting in a progressive harmonization of drafting styles toward American standards, which are longer by nature. The portfolio construction hypothesis seems a less important driver but nevertheless highlights substantial changes in patenting practices. These results raise two questions: Do these evolving patenting practices indicate more valuable patents? Do they induce any embarrassment for the patent system?<p><p>4. Measuring patent value: If the former of these two questions is to be addressed, measures are needed to identify higher value patents. Chapter 4 therefore proposes a review of the state of the art on patent value indicators and analyses several issues in their measurement and interpretation. Five classes of indicators proposed in the literature may be obtained directly from patent databases: the number of countries in which each patent is enforced, the number of years during which each patent has been renewed, the grant decision taken, the number of citations received from subsequent patents, and whether it has been opposed by a third party before the EPO. Because the former two measures are closely connected (the geographical scope of protection and length of maintenance can hardly be observed independently), they have been subjected to closer scrutiny in the first section of chapter 4, which shows that these two dimensions have experienced opposite evolutions. A composite measure – the Scope-Year Index – reveals that the overall trend is oriented downwards, which may suggest a substantial decline in the average value of patents. The second section of chapter 4 returns to the five initial classes of measures and underlines their main patterns. It appears that most of them witness the well-known properties of patent value: a severe skewness and large country and technology variations. A closer look at their relationships, however, reveals a high degree of orthogonality between them and opposite trends in their evolution, suggesting that they actually capture different dimensions of a patent’s value and therefore do not always pinpoint the same patents as being the most valuable. This result strongly discourages the reliance on one of the available indicators only and opens some avenue for the creation of one potential composite index of value based upon the five indicators to maximize the chances of capturing all potentially valuable patents in a large database. The proposed index reflects the intensity of the signal provided by all 5 constituting indicators on the potential value of each patent. Its declining trend reflects a rarefaction of this signal on average, leading to different plausible interpretations.<p><p>5. The links with patent value: Based upon the six indicators of value proposed in chapter 4 (the five classical ones plus the composite), the question of the association between filing strategies and the value of patents may be analysed. This question is empirically addressed in chapter 5, which focuses on all EPO patents filed between 1990 and 1995. The first section presents a comprehensive review of the existing evidence on the determinants of patent value. The numerous contributions in the field differ widely along three dimensions (the indicator of value chosen as dependent variable, the sampling methodology, and the set of variables tested as determinants), which have translated into many ambiguities across the literature. Section 2 proposes measures to identify different dimensions of filing strategies, which are essentially twofold: they relate to the routes followed by patent filings toward the EPO (PCT, accelerated processing), and to their form (excess claims, share of claims lost in examination), and construction (by assembly or disassembly, divisional). These measures are then included into an econometric model based upon the framework provided by the literature. The proposed model, which integrates the set of filing strategy variables along with some of the classical determinants, is regressed on the six available indicators separately over the full sample. In addition, the sensitivity of the available results to the indicator and the sampling methodology is assessed through 18 geographic and 14 industrial clustered regressions and about 30 regressions over random samples for each indicator. The estimates are then compared across countries, industries and indicators. These results first reveal that filing strategies are indicative of more valuable patents and provide the most stable determinants of all. And third, the results do confirm some classical determinants in their positive association with patent value, but highlight a high degree of sensitivity of most of them to the indicator or the sample chosen for the analysis, requiring much care in generalizing such empirical results.<p><p>6. The links with patent length: Chapter 6 focuses on one particular dimension of patent value: the length of patents. To do so, the censored nature of the dependent variable (the time elapsed between the filing of a patent application and its ultimate fall into the public domain) dictates the recourse to a survival time model as proposed by Cox (1972). The analysis is original in three main respects. First of all, despite the fact that renewal data have been exploited for about two decades to obtain estimates of patent value (Pakes and Schankerman, 1984), this chapter provides – to the best of our knowledge – the first comprehensive analysis of the determinants of patent length. Second, whereas most of the empirical literature in the field focuses on granted patents and investigates their maintenance, the analysis reported here includes all patent applications. This comprehensive approach is dictated by the provisional rights provided by pending applications to their holders and by the legal uncertainty these represent for competitors. And third, the model integrates a wide set of explanatory variables, starting with the filing strategy variables proposed in chapter 5. The main results are threefold: first, they clearly show that patent rights have significantly increased in length over the past decades despite a small apparent decline in the average grant rate, but largely due to the expansion of the examination process. Second, they indicate that most filing strategies induce considerable delays in the examination process, possibly to the benefit of the patentee, but most certainly to the expense of legal uncertainty on the markets. And third, they confirm that more valuable patents (more cited or covering a larger geographical scope) take more time to process, and live longer, whereas more complex applications are associated with longer decision lags, but also with lower grant and renewal rates.<p><p>7. Conclusions: The potential economic consequences and some policy implications of the findings from the dissertation are discussed in chapter 7. The evolution of patenting practices analysed in these works has some direct consequences for the stakeholders of the patent system. For the EPO, they generate a considerable increase in workload, resulting in growing backlogs and processing lags. For innovative firms, this phenomenon translates into an undesired increase in legal uncertainty, for it complicates the assessment of the limits to each party’s rights and hence of the freedom to operate on a market, which is precisely what the so-called ‘patent trolls’ and ‘submariners’ may be looking for. Although empirical evidence is lacking, some fear that this may result in underinvestment in research, development or commercialization activities (e.g. Hall and Harhoff, 2004). In addition, legal uncertainty is synonymous with an increased risk of litigation, which may hamper the development of SMEs and reduce the level of entrepreneurship. Finally, for society, we are left with a contrasted picture, which is hard to interpret. The European patent system wishes to maintain high quality standards to reduce business uncertainty around granted patents, but it is overloaded with the volume of applications filed, resulting in growing backglogs which translate into legal uncertainty surrounding pending applications. The filing strategies that contribute to this situation might reflect a legitimate need for more time and flexibility in filing more valuable patents, but they could also easily turn into real abuses of the system, allowing some patentees to obtain and artificially maintain provisional rights conferred by pending applications on inventions that might not meet the patentability requirements. Distinguishing between these two cases goes beyond the scope of the present dissertation, but should they be found abusive, they should be fought for they consume resources and generate uncertainty. And if legitimate, then they should be understood and the system adapted accordingly (e.g. by adjusting fees to discourage some strategies, raising the inventive step, fine-tuning the statutory term in certain technologies, providing more legal tools for patent examiners to reject unpatentable applications, etc.) so as to better serve the need of inventors for legal protection in a more efficient way, and to adapt the patent system to the challenges it is or will be facing. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

No description available.