International patent protection was a key issue at the multilateral trade talks sponsored by the World Trade Organization in Cancun in September 2003. Indeed, since the organization was founded almost ten years ago, the international protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) has been a bone of contention between developing and industrialized countries.At that time, developing countries d...

We study the determinants of patent suits and their outcomes over the period 1978-1999 by linking detailed information from the U.S. patent office, the federal court system, and industry sources. The probability of being involved in a suit is very heterogeneous, being much higher for valuable patents and for patents owned by individuals and smaller firms. Thus the patent system generates incent...

Stronger intellectual property rights (IPRs) induce specialization and contribute to economic growth. In the United States, a sweeping pro-patent legal reform in 1982 fostered specialization and enhanced firm performance. Around the world, countries experience faster economic growth when their innovating sectors are characterized by a higher level of specialization. An endogenous growth model w...

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) have become ubiquitous in the current debate and have emerged as the key issue of global innovation policy. The ‘Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights’ (TRIPS), signed on 1994 as a founding element of the World Trade Organization, represent the most important attempt to establish a global harmonization of Intellectual Property protection. The ...

A new technique of digital watermarking for graylevel images is reported in this paper. Digital watermarking/hiding has emerged as a new area of research in connection to Intellectual Property (IP) protection of images. The redundancy in image representation can be exploited successfully to hide some characteristic information in images, without noticeable distortion. Hidden information after e...

intellectual property law is premised traditionally on the protection of inventions (patent), literary and artistic property (copyright), and signs (trade mark); and sui generis rights, such as design law, stand outside this framework and are constantly questioned and re-shaped the fashion industry is an intellectual property (ip) intensive industry, continually generating and commercially expl...

Intellectual property rights (IPR) in biotechnology are having a dramatic negative effect on the progress of nonprofit research. Although patent policy and law intend to facilitate research progress, the current practice has led to many barriers in access and use of genetic materials and DNA technology. Such barriers restrict the free exchange of information and threaten the health of our natio...

This paper investigates in an exploratory manner the licensing strategies pursued by firms whose business model is based on developing and licensing out their intellectual property rights (IPRs). These are not traditional suppliers, since they do not engage in production or commercialization, but focus solely on invention. While considerable anecdotal evidence exists about these IP vendors, the...

Intellectual property rights (IPR) of computer software is the right to assign the software to its creator, not limited to time and space, and non-transferable. Proving IPR of the creators of computer software requires a rigorous review of the ways in which these rights may be violated. The present study was conducted by comparing two populations in Iran with the aim of identifying the level of...