INTRODUCTION ket structure can be maintained concurrent with a patent system. The first is public perception. This paper examines the issues surrounding The patent is not viewed as government regulathe patenting of life forms, specifically the social tion with a purpose, but as a fundamental part of and private costs and benefits of the Plant Varithe institution of private property; not as the ...

This article presents a feasibility study for retrieving Wikipedia articles matching patents’ topics. The long term motivation behind it is to facilitate patent search by enriching patent indexing with relevant keywords found in external (terminological) resources, with their monolingual synonyms and multilingual translations. The similarity between patents and Wikipedia articles is measured us...

Knowledge management from a strategic planning point of view often requires having an accurate understanding of a firm’s or a nation’s competences in a given technological discipline. Knowledge maps have been used for the purpose of discovering the location, ownership and value of intellectual assets. The purpose of this article is to develop a new method for assessing national and firmlevel co...

Classic patent theory relies on an incentive model to justify the grant of exclusionary patent rights. 1 Under the model, potential patent rights provide an incentive to those who would set about the task of innovating. In constitutional language, this incentive operates to “promote the progress” in the “useful arts.” Patents are only one tool of innovation policy, and we regularly find innovat...

Cities are engines of the knowledge-based economy, because they are the primary sites of knowledge production activities that subsequently shape the rate and direction of technological change and economic growth. Patents provide a wealth of information to analyse the knowledge specialization at specific places, such as technological details and information on inventors and entities involved, in...

Patent data have long been used as an indicator of the output of innovative processes. While simple patent counts are publicly available and easily obtained, the private and social value of innovations protected by patents varies widely, making patent counts too noisy an indicator of innovative output in many cases. In finding good measures of the value of patents, it is essential to observe th...

Questions about ownership permeate the history of computing. Some of their most common manifestations involve the ownership of individual machines, from mainframe leases to personal computer purchases. Some of their most unusual manifestations involve national debates on the scope of intellectual property (IP) rights. Connecting these questions are stories about the uses and limits of IP that h...