Informationsplattformen Internet har blivit som en självklarhet för många. Dock har den tekniska utvecklingen medfört omfattande upphovsrättsintrång på Internet och utmaningen att komma till rätta med problemet utgör främst fall där Internetleverantörer eller så kallade mellanhänder av teknikens hjälp endast tillhandahåller uppkoppling till nätet. Med anledning av att Internetleverantörers tjänster utnyttjas av kunder för att begå intrång kan det diskuteras huruvida det är möjligt och eftersträvbart att ålägga dessa leverantörer en blockeringsskyldighet för att begränsa åtkomsten av Internet. Vitesförbudsbestämmelsen 53 b § i upphovsrättslagen och även annan reglering ger begränsat utrymme för att meddela förelägganden mot mellanhänder i den utsträckning som torde vara önskvärd utifrån den olagliga verksamhet som förekommer på Internet. Med stöd av 53 b § har Internetleverantörer förbjudits att tillhandahålla uppkoppling till tjänster som används på ett sätt som innebär upphovsrättsintrång. Domstolen är uppenbart medveten om att ”förbjuda uppkoppling” respektive ”blockera” endast innebär en hårfin skillnad. Även i den situation när tjänsten kommer ifrån ett land utanför EU och torde vara laglig i det landet verkar heller inte påverka svaret på frågan. Det kan anses att EU-rätten talar för en mer generös tolkning med hänsyn till exempelvis ett nyligen avgjort mål från Storbritannien. Dock framgår det av EU-rättspraxis att nationell domstol inte tillåts att i förebyggande syfte och utan utredning om intrång framtvinga blockering eller införande av filtreringssystem. En annan frågeställning som aktualiseras är om en möjlig censur av Internet kan anses förenlig med censurförbudet i grundlagarna och om ett åläggande kan anses förenligt med förbudet för medlemstaterna att ålägga en allmän övervakningsskyldighet för tjänsteleverantörer. / Internet as a platform for information has become as obvious to many. However, technological developments have resulted in widespread copyright infringement on the Internet and the challenge to deal with the problem are mostly cases where Internet service providers (ISPs) or known as intermediaries by using technology only provides connectivity to the Internet. As a result of those ISPs whose services are utilized by customers to infringe, it may be arguable whether it is possible and pursued to impose these suppliers a blockage obligation to limit access of the Internet. The rule of injunction § 53 b of the copyright law and other regulations provide limited scope for injunctions against intermediaries to the extent as would be desirable from the illegal activities on the Internet. According to § 53 b, the ISPs are banned from providing access to services that are used in a way that constitutes copyright infringement. The Court is obviously aware of the subtle difference between “prohibit access” and “block”. Even in the situation when the service comes from a country outside the EU and could probably be legal there does not seem to affect the response to the question. It may be considered that EU law could points out a more generous interpretation regarding, for example, a recently determined case from the UK. However, it appears from the EU law that national courts are not allowed to force blocking or introduction of filtering system only in order to prevent a future infringe and without investigation of such an infringe. Another question that arises is whether a possible censorship of the Internet can be considered as consistent with the censorship ban in the constitutions and whether an injunction may be considered compatible with the prohibition for Member States to impose a general monitoring obligation on service providers.

The Canadian canola breeding sector met a transition from publicly funded breeding research to large private investments in research and development (R&D). The increasing use of biotechnology tools in the mid 1990s made the assignment of plant ownership technically possible while the legislative safeguards that were put in place during the same period enabled owners to take juristic actions against potential infringers. Today, canola breeding sector is dominated by large multinational firms. The generation of proprietary knowledge in the canola breeding sector has caused a freedom to operate issue. Private and public firms conducting canola R&D are seriously concerned about their ability to gain and preserve access to key technologies in an IPR world. <p>This thesis uses the tragedy of the anticommons framework to analyze the consequences of increased intellectual property protection in the canola breeding sector. Theory suggests that when a common resource is owned by multiple owners, each of the owners has the incentive to overcharge potential users, leading to the underuse of the resource. In R&D, different owners of complementary technologies may overcharge potential R&D firms that want to assemble different technological pieces to produce a new one. The result is forgoing research and development of new products.<p>The results of personal interviews with thirteen canola researchers and IP officers are presented and analyzed. The results suggest that the increase in the intellectual property protection in the last two decades in the canola breeding sector has led to difficulties with canola R&D. These difficulties take the form of reduced access to current, proprietary and public material. With hampered access to research input material, research output is not maximized and potential research may be forgone. Interviewees described how the increase in the intellectual property protection affects their personal and organizations ability to conduct research as well as some the implications of the new IP regime on the canola breeding sector. There is indication that canola breeding sector is moving towards a super-protectionism. Under these conditions, canola R&D firms, private and public, are in search for ways that will open access to enabling technologies and research areas. The creation of platform technologies and collaborations are the most prominent ones and are observed to increase in occurrence world wide.

China¡¦s behavior towards the intellectual property rights (IPR) regime is a reflection of the tug-of-war between regime and national interest. IPR, a concept foreign to Chinese culture, began to influence China following the reforms of 1978 through both external and internal pressures. This paper attempts to show how the power of international rules and national interests impacts China¡¦s IPR behavior by analyzing its attitude towards IPR negotiations, trends related to its IPR legal framework and enforcement. This analysis can be broken down into three different periods. 1. 1979-1990: Interaction between national interest and international norm. China¡¦s action of both participating in the world IPR regime and the building of a domestic IPR system was to large extent motivated by self-interest. China needed a systematic IPR framework in place to meet its new economic conditions: attracting FDI and technology transfers while protecting indigenous infant industries. However, there is little evidence that China¡¦s actions during this period showed compliance with the global IPR regime. 2. 1990-2000: Moving towards compromise. China¡¦s negotiations with the United States dominated trends in its IPR reform and reoriented China¡¦s national interests. As China¡¦s largest trade partner and hegemon in the IPR issue area, the U.S. played a strong role in making Chinese IPR laws more transparent and aligned with the international standard. For sustaining economic development, China realized it needed to create an environment friendly to foreign investors and protect its growing export industry of patented products, and Chinese leaders therefore conceded to a large part of U.S.¡¦s demands. Nonetheless, the reform mostly focused on the legal system while enforcement was overlooked, continuing the rampant IPR infringement. 3. 21st century: Compliance under the WTO regime. Through its experience in the 1990s, and its membership in the WTO, China¡¦s IPR policies in the 21st century have become more proactive and globalized, implying that China is willing to accept higher degrees of interdependence. In this period, China has strived to conform to TRIPS (Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) and has tackled its enforcement problem with a number of practical administrative and judicial policies to help reassure foreign investors and a growing amount of local IPR holders of the security of their IP. In the end however, the analysis in this paper still shows that China¡¦s current IPR protection policies still favor China¡¦s national interests over the interests of the global IPR regime. This paper finds that the global IPR regime has helped to influence a new agenda for the PRC: to pursue a knowldege-based economy as a development goal. China now intends to follow the rules of the global IPR regime. The central government's capability of enforceing IPR policy at every level of government is an important benchmark in examining China's response to the global IPR regime in the future.

Innovation ecosystem strategy is often adopted by platform technology owners to seek complementary innovation from resources located outside the firm to exploit indirect network effect. In this dissertation I aim to address the issues that are related to the formation and business value of platform innovation ecosystems in the enterprise software industry. The first study explores the role of three factors - increased payoff from access to platform owner's installed base, risk of misappropriation due to knowledge transfer, and the extent of competition - in shaping the decisions of third-party complementors to join a platform ecosystem. The second study evaluates the effect of participation in a platform ecosystem on small independent software vendors' business performances, and how their appropriability strategies, such as ownership of intellectual property rights or downstream complementary capabilities, affect the returns from such partnerships. Built upon resource based view and theory of dynamic capabilities, the third study reveals that users' co-innovation in enterprise information systems, measured by their participation in online professional community networks, constitute a source of intangible organizational asset that helps to enhance firm level IT productivity.

Intelektinės nuosavybės teisių išsėmimo taisyklė – vienas glaudžiausiai su prekyba ir laisvo prekių judėjimo principu susijusių intelektinės nuosavybės teisės institutų, sukeliantis ne tik teisines, bet ir ekonomines pasekmes. Pagrindinis nagrinėjamo instituto taikymo tikslas Europos Sąjungos teisėje – užtikrinti tinkamą pusiausvyrą tarp intelektinės nuosavybės teisių apsaugos, teisių turėtojo interesų ir laisvo prekių judėjimo principo. Teisių išsėmimo taisyklės taikymas sąlygoja tai, kad tam tikroje teritorijoje pirmą kartą teisių turėtojui ar jo sutikimu pardavus intelektinės nuosavybės teisės saugomas prekes, teisė toliau kontroliuoti šių prekių perleidimą toje teritorijoje yra išsemiama. Teisės doktrinoje skiriamas nacionalinis, regioninis ir tarptautinis intelektinės nuosavybės teisių išsėmimas. Europos Sąjunga pasirinkusi regioninį intelektinės nuosavybės teisių išsėmimą. Prekių ženklais yra pažymėtos dauguma prekių, todėl prekių ženklo savininko teisių išsėmimas yra labiausiai susijęs su paralelinės prekybos problematika. Prekių ženklų direktyvos 7 straipsnis, nustatantis prekių ženklo savininko teisių išsėmimą, doktrinoje vertinamas kaip vienas kontroversiškiausių Direktyvos straipsnių. ETT Silhouette byloje konstatavo, kad Prekių ženklų direktyvos 7 straipsnis nesuteikia valstybėms narėms galimybės nacionaliniuose įstatymuose nustatyti tarptautinio prekių ženklo savininko teisių išsėmimo. Dėl pasirinkto regioninio prekių ženklo suteikiamų teisių išsėmimo režimo, jo... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The principle of exhaustion of intellectual property rights is an institute of intellectual property law closely related to international trade and the principle of free movement of goods. This principle causes not only legal but also important economic consequences. There are three types of the principle of exhaustion - national, regional and international exhaustion of intellectual property rights. In the European Union law a regional exhaustion was established by a whole series of decisions of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The main purpose of the exhaustion rule is to prevent intellectual property owners from using their exclusive rights in order to partition the market, to safeguard the balance between the protection of intellectual property rights and the principle of free movement of goods in the Community. The application of the exhaustion rule determines that once goods protected by any right of intellectual property are placed on the market by or with the consent of the right-owner, the right to control further distribution of these goods are exhausted. Trade marks are of fundamental importance in the market. Exhaustion of trade mark rights is an issue most related to the problematic of parallel trade. The Article 7 of the Trade mark Directive, which establishes the exhaustion of trade mark rights, is one of the most controversial articles of this Directive. It was concluded in Silhouette case that Article 7 of the Trade Mark Directive precluded Member States... [to full text]

International conventions signifies international trade, which in itself would be ineffective if there were no dispute settlement mechanisms. This essay intends to examine how dispute settlement mechanisms between states have developed over the years and a large emphasis is placed on the World Trade Organizations (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body since it’s had great significance for the efficiency of international law. In order to show the need for dispute settlement mechanisms, a background to the conventions that have called for the development of the DSB is in order. This essay focuses on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), and the agreement that currently regulate intellectual property rights, Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), but also its connection to the DSB. The current negotiations between the EU and the USA for a free trade agreement, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is also mentioned since it intends to serve as a global model once settled. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze the emergence of the TRIPS agreement, and its relation to the dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO.

<p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2013. Introduction together with 3 papers.</p>

Por que a indústria editorial está empreendendo a difusão do livro digital quando esse padrão tecnológico perturba o regime de proteção e enforcement do copyright? Se a duplicação da criação intelectual e sua transmissão simultânea por meio de um arquivo digital inviabiliza o aparato coercitivo que ampara o enforcement do copyright, emerge daí um paradoxo. Por que precisamos dessa proteção jurídica? A questão central desta dissertação busca responder como a alocação de recursos na indústria editorial revela as escolhas estratégicas específicas para apropriação de lucros. Este trabalho é conduzido como uma pesquisa exploratória multidisciplinar por meio dos referenciais da economia histórica, economia do conhecimento, economia neoinstitucional, sociologia econômica e estratégia. Após a introdução, o trabalho foi desenvolvido em cinco partes. Os quatro capítulos iniciais desenvolvem quatro ensaios teóricos correlacionados em que, por diferentes perspectivas, busca-se elucidar o efeito resultante (positivo ou negativo) da proteção da propriedade intelectual sobre bem-estar social e sobre os mecanismos contratuais e estratégias empregados pelos agentes econômicos em reação ao delineamento jurídico copyright. O último capítulo encerra o trabalho com três pesquisas empíricas. Com o intuito de capturar os efeitos de diferentes ambientes institucionais é feita uma análise institucional comparativa entre quatro países (Brasil, Estados Unidos, França e Reino Unido) no período entre 1999 e 2010, buscando compreender como as organizações alocam recursos para apropriar lucros. A partir dos principais determinantes desta mudança tecnológica as características da regulação de copyright norte-americana e seu peso e influência no comércio internacional de bens intelectuais, na ação estratégica de dois agentes poderosos, a Amazon , Apple e Google e, finalmente, na existência de valor econômico representado pelas obras públicas existentes em domínio público que podem ser capturadas e ofertadas no formato digital - conclui-se que antes de almejar lucro, a indústria editorial busca acordar uma nova organização setorial para a criação e a distribuição de excedentes que vai impactar em uma nova forma de especialização e coordenação da produção. O presente estudo desenvolve uma abordagem de business history, colocando-se como uma interface entre a economia da propriedade intelectual, a análise institucional e a organização da firma e dos mercados / Why is the book business adopting and diffusing the digital book technology when this standard is supposed to disturb the enforcement of the copyright regime? If the digital reproduction of intellectual work is also followed by simultaneous and ubiquitous distribution and making it even harder to enforce the mechanisms that bounds the copyright a paradox emerges as a consequence. Why is this legal regulation necessary? We pursue to investigate the research question how the publishing business resource allocation strategy is correlated to profit appropriation. This dissertation is developed as a multidisciplinary effort based on the theoretical pillars within economic history, knowledge economy, neoinstitutional economics, sociology economics and strategy. After introduction, the work is divided in five chapters. The four initial chapters develop four correlated theoretical essays, with different lenses, aimed to search how the system of intellectual property rights affects, positively and negatively, the welfare and the strategic and contractual mechanisms carried by the economic agent as a reaction towards the copyright legal system. The final chapter concludes the research with three empirical investigations. Four different institutional environments - Brazil, France, United Kingdom and United States are comparatively evaluated in order to capture the effects of the industry resource allocation strategy and its relation to profit appropriation. The conclusion is that the main drivers of technology change - the special features of the North American regulation and its major importance on international trade, the strategic impact of major players, Amazon Apple and Google, and the large number of works available in the public domain to be captured - it is argued that the publishing business is not necessarily seeking to make a profit in the short term but gearing into a new production and distribution arrangement which is going to result in a new system of rent creation and distribution. This research is developed as a business history narrative, positioned within the fields of economics of intellectual property rights, institutional analysis and the study of firm and market organization.

This theses analyses necessity and legitimacy of existence of intellectual property rights, especially patents and copyrights. There is shown the true essence of these instruments as monopoly privilege. On case of information technology I demonstrate that these privileges are unreasonable and counterproductive in many cases. Analysis of ?free software? alternative model proves that use of patents and copyrights is not a necessary condition of creation of intangible goods. The last part of this work shows, that existence of any special instruments for intangible goods protection is not needed as well as it is not reasonable.

L’objet de cette thèse est d’expliquer le lien entre utilisation de marques et activités innovantes. Le premier chapitre décrit les principaux aspects juridiques des marques et passe en revue la littérature en économie et gestion s’y rapportant. Le second chapitre analyse comment et pourquoi les firmes utilisent les marques et comment celles-ci s’intègrent dans leurs activités innovantes. À travers une approche théorique et empirique, nous montrons que les marques sont utilisées en lien avec les innovations prenant place à l’interface du marché, principalement les innovations de produit et de marketing. Le troisième chapitre étudie les interactions entre marques et brevets dans la protection de l’innovation. Nous montrons que selon les caractéristiques du marché ils peuvent se complémenter ou se substituer l’un à l’autre. Dans le dernier chapitre, nous explorons les schémas d’utilisation de marques par les universités et leur lien avec les activités de recherche de ces institutions. / This thesis aims at explaining the link between trade mark use and innovative activities. The first chapter describes the main legal aspects of trade marks and reviews existing literature in economics and management relating to them. The second chapter analyses how and why firms use trade marks and how they integrate them in their innovative activities. Through a theoretical and empirical approach, we show that trade marks are used in relation to innovations which are at the interface of the market, mainly product and marketing innovations. The third chapter then studies the interrelated effect of trade marks and patents in the protection of innovation. We show that depending on market characteristics, they may complement or substitute each other. In the fourth and final chapter, we explore the patterns of trade mark use by academic institutions, and investigate how these relate to their research activities.