This paper addresses the charge made by environmental groups that oil companies, since the 1970's, have been acquiring alternative energy patents, to restrict these technologies from reaching the market. The purpose of these restrictions was to protect profits from oil, natural gas and coal. In addressing this charge, I reviewed the literature to ascertain if any conclusive study had been performed to substantiate this charge. To date, none had been performed. While no conclusive study had been performed to support the environmentalist position, an evaluation of economic theory along with an examination of actual U.S. Patent Office data strongly contradicts the environmentalist view. / Master of Arts

[Truncated abstract] Technological innovation is considered the main contributor to economic growth. The systems of innovation framework aims to examine the causal pathways leading to technological innovation. However, most existing research under this framework, due to theoretical or methodological weaknesses, is unable to validate causal pathways or determinants of innovation. Institutions that guide human interaction within innovation systems are thought to be particularly important. The challenge has been to develop a taxonomy with which to conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of the institutional milieu on innovation. This thesis examines medical technological innovation within Australia and provides a basis from which such a taxonomy and other associated measures for systems of innovation have been developed. Medical industries are economically significant in developed countries and are amongst the most profitable worldwide. They use patents extensively to protect their innovations. In this context medical patents are an efficient means of examining the determinants of innovation. Few studies worldwide have explored the commercialisation process from patent to technological innovation and none has examined medical patents specifically. This thesis contains three empirical studies: - a description of Australian medical technology patented in the US between 1984-1999; - a survey of their inventors to examine the commercialisation process and identify the determinants of technological innovation; and - a case study of the commercialisation of an invention arising within an Australian university using qualitative methods. The first study is a population-based descriptive study of all US medical patents granted to Australian resident inventors between 1984 and 1999. During this period 7,835 US patents were granted to Australian resident inventors. Of these, 17% are identified as medical, and the proportion of medical patents rose from 10% to 25% of all Australian patents in the US from 1984 to 1999. The increase is largely due to Australian biotechnology patents, which increased from 10% to 55% of all medical patents during this period. Overall, medical patents are an increasingly significant proportion of Australia’s intellectual property portfolio. The second study is a survey of 402 first-named Australian inventors listed on the 602 medical patents granted in the US in 1984-1994. The aim is to assess their experience and success in commercialising their patented inventions. The correct address was found for 274 inventors of whom 177 (65%) were surveyed with no evidence of a significant response bias. This is the first known study surveying a nationally representative sample of medical inventors listed on patents

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This thesis proves that intangible assets are impossible to accurately value because of their inherently complex attributes. Intangibles have always existed in the market, but their presence has nearly quadrupled in the last few decades due to the Information Revolution. This technological breakthrough was characterized by the globalization of knowledge, communication, and trade. This dissemination of knowledge due to the infrastructural changes of both the telecommunication and transportation industries transformed the economy from a ‘product-driven’ market to a ‘knowledge-driven’ market. This surge in intangible assets is significant because it proves that “knowledge-driven” elements are now material to company value. As such, accurate measurement of intangible assets is essential to preserving the reliability of financial statements. Current accounting practices largely ignore the value created by intangible asset and this has serious consequences for investors, firms, and the economy as a whole. Insufficient accounting of intangible assets distorts company value, increases the cost of capital, and compromises the reliability of financial statements. While it is utterly impossible to create accounting standards that will, without fail, accurately measure all intangible assets as well as take into account their lifespans, volatility, increasing economies of scale, partial excludability, and lack of tradability, this thesis proposes a way to help mitigate the disparity between what financial statements recognize and what companies actually generate.

This dissertation will take a theoretical approach to analyzing certain challenges in the design of intellectual property rights (`IPR') policy. The first essay looks the advisability of introducing IPR into a market which is currently only very lightly protected - the US fashion industry. The proposed Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act is intended to introduce EU standards into the US. Using a sequential, 2-firm, vertical differentiation framework, I analyze the effects of protection on investment in innovative designs by high-quality (`designer') and lower-quality (`mass-market') firms when the mass-marketer may opt to imitate, consumers prefer trendsetting designs and firms compete in prices. I show that design protection, by transforming mass-marketers from imitators to innovators, may reduce both designer pro ts and welfare. The model provides possible explanations for the dearth of EU case law and the increase in designer/mass-marketer collaborations. The second essay contributes to the literature on patent design and fee shifting, contrasting the effects of the American (or `each party pays') rule and English (or `losing party pays') rule of legal cost allocation on optimal patent breadth when innovation is sequential and firms are differentiated duopolists. I show that if litigation spending is endogenous, the American rule may induce broader patents and a higher probability of infringement than the English rule if R&D costs are sufficiently low. If, however, R&D costs are moderate, the ranking is reversed and it is the English rule that leads to broader patents. Neither rule supports lower patent breadth than the other over the entire parameter space. As such, any attempts to reform the US patent system by narrowing patents must carefully weigh the impact on firms' legal spending decisions if policymakers do not wish to adversely affect investment incentives. The third and final essay analyzes the effects of corporate structure on licensing behaviour. Policymakers and legal scholars are concerned about the potential for an Anticommons, an underuse of early stage research tools to produce complex final products, typically arising from either blocking or stacking. I use a simple, one-period differentiated duopoly model to show that if patentees have flexibility in corporate structure, Anticommons problems are greatly reduced. The model suggests that if the patentee owns the single (or single set) of essential IPR and goods are of symmetric quality, Anticommons issues may be entirely eliminated, as the patentee will always license, simply shifting its corporate structure depending on the identity of the downstream competitor. If the rival produces a more valuable good, Anticommons problems are reduced. Further, if the patentee holds 1 of 2 essential patents, the ability to shift its corporate structure may reduce total licensing costs to rival firms. However the analysis offers a cautionary note: while spin-offs by the patentee help to sustain downstream competition, they may restrict market output, and therefore welfare. Thus the inefficiency in the patent system may be in the opposite direction than is currently thought - there may be too much technology transfer, rather than too little.

European legal regulation of patents in the area of science and research Bioethics is an important part of law regulation in the medical field. According to the current state, bioethics is able to highlighted main issues, which are connected with medical research and suggest possible solution.This paper combines two controversial topics. First one is human embryonic stem cell research and second one is research on nanoparts and indicates Intelectual Property Law possibilities in this field. Paper is divided into two parts. First one deals with the legal regulation on research on embryo in the Czech Republic and in other states of The Western Europe. Main focus is based on patentability of research concerned with the human embryonic stem cells, which might have a great therapeutic potential but their preparation necessarily leads to the destruction of "human embryos". (HESC) Main concern is connected with regard to the European law and the current ground- breaking judgement, Brüstle v. Greenpeace eV. In mentioned judgment European Court of Justice held that after interpretation of the Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions , it will not be able to grant a patent on research which led in the destruction of a human embryo. Paper also includes assessment of the attitude of the...

In 2013, the US Supreme Court declared isolated gene sequences as ‘products of nature’ and hence, unpatentable subject matter. Paradoxically, the European Patent Office (EPO), relying on the EU Biotech Directive 98/44/EC, does not perceive a problem with patents on isolated human genetic sequences. However, the EPO excludes human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) from being patentable subject matter on the grounds of morality and ordre public. The controversy arises from an understanding that gene patents create a de facto tragedy of the anti-commons. This, in turn, is based on a wider belief that the current statutory regime governing the patent protection of human genetic materials creates expansive property rights, without a proper consideration of the public interest. This thesis tests this proposition by examining and revealing the contextual genesis of these bifurcated reactions by the United States and European jurists. First, it reframes the historical evolution of patented inventions within the biotechnology sector. By adopting the concept of patents as a social contract between the inventor and society, the research reasserts the fundamental aspects of patent law. Second, the subsequent chapters employ this primary premise in order to map out the theoretical arguments for propertizing genetic materials. Finally, the thesis investigates the possibility of policy guidelines by gathering an empirical dataset through questionnaires and interviews directed at key stakeholders. This work maintains that the current statutory regimes in Europe and the US governing the patent protection of human genetic materials can create acceptable property rights. But this is only possible if the regime adopts a purpose-bound approach for human genetic materials. Such an enhanced status quo approach, as adopted in some European jurisdictions, would entail the consideration of public interest values, as articulated through the empirical research, and which has been set out as a draft manifesto.

This dissertation, which consists of four chapters, uses historical patent data to understand invention in the United States. The first chapter studies how institutions of higher education affect invention. The second chapter seeks to understand the importance of informal social interactions for the creation of new ideas. The third chapter answers the question of what types of individuals are most likely to become inventors. The fourth chapter discusses various historical patent datasets in detail. In Chapter 1, I exploit historical natural experiments to identify the causal effect of the establishment of new colleges on local patenting. Using losing finalist counties that did not receive a new college as counterfactuals, I find that the establishment of a new college caused 33% more patents per year in college counties relative to the losing finalists. To understand the role of a college education in driving patenting in college towns, I use a novel dataset of graduates from college yearbooks and find that a college's graduates and faculty account for a very small share of the patents granted in that college's county. Changes in county population account for 45-65% of the increase in patenting in college counties. In Chapter 2, I exploit a different historical policy to understand the importance of informal social interactions for invention. More specifically, I examine the effects of state-level alcohol prohibition in the U.S. Prior to the enactment of statewide alcohol laws, each county determined its own alcohol policies. Thus, statewide prohibition differentially treated counties depending on whether they were wet or dry prior to statewide adoption. The imposition of statewide prohibition reduces the number of patents by 15% per year in previously wet counties relative to previously dry counties. The effect is largest in the first three years after the imposition of prohibition and diminishes thereafter. Consistent with this decrease being driven by a disruption of informal social interactions, the patenting rate for men decreased more than that for women in previously wet counties. In Chapter 3, my coauthors and I match the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Patents from 1870 to 1940 to the corresponding U.S. Federal Population Censuses. This matching procedure provides a rich set of demographic information on a comprehensive set of inventors, allowing us to answer the fundamental question of who invents. We first document that patentees are more likely to be older, white, male and to be living in a state other than the one in which they were born. These patterns are very persistent over space and time. We then attempt to identify correlates of the demographics of patentees focusing on county-level economic and demographic characteristics. Beyond the most obvious, such as the fraction of a particular demographic group in that county, very little explains differences in the demographics of inventors across counties. In Chapter 4, I compare the strengths and weaknesses of four historical patent datasets and consider the suitability of each for use in economic research. I describe in detail differences in terms of the type and reliability of included information and potential sample selection issues. I show that while there are differences across datasets, overall they paint a remarkably consistent picture of invention in U.S. history.

In March 1991 the World Intellectual Property Organization held an international symposium attended primarily by lawyers, to discuss the questions that artificial intelligence poses for intellectual property law (i.e., copyright and patents). This is an edited version of a talk presented there, which argues that AI poses few problems in the near term and that almost all the truly challenging issues arise instead from software in general. The talk was an attempt to bridge the gap between the legal community and the software community, to explain why existing concepts and categories in intellectual property law present such difficult problems for software, and why software as a technology breaks several important assumptions underlying intellectual property law.