This paper analyzes the main economic issues of intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO). A retrospective view on the establishment of the TRIPS (traderelated aspects of intellectual property rights) Agreement, a still controversial accomplishment of the Uruguay Round of trade liberalization, is provided. The paper reviews the economic ...

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...

The legal stability of granted patents is uncertain, a fact that entails inefficiencies for the patentee as for third parties. It is an important question for intellectual property policy and management how severe this problem is. Few patents are litigated, and those that are are not a random selection. We thus ask: if a randomly picked patent underwent revocation proceedings, what would be the...

Documentation The documentation required to implement an investment will normally comprise: a subscription and shareholders agreement; articles of association (the by-laws or rules setting out how the company is operated); share option schemes (allocating a pool of shares to reward employees and management team mem­ bers); assignments and licences of intellectual property (if not already entere...

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...