The patent law regimes of the United States and Europe are ambiguous regarding whether or not the subject matter of patents ought to be restricted to that of technology. This ambiguity is exacerbated by the difficulties faced by lawmakers in defining technology; and it confounds contemporary...

This article argues that effectiveness and legitimacy are two inseparable issues for the success of economic governance systems. Moving beyond the conventional market failure and state failure approaches, the article develops the notion of network governance success, a notion that looks at the...

The U.S. has been under pressure to abandon the unique first-to-invent feature of its patent law for awarding patents. The opposition to reform however argues that switch to a first-to-file rule, the international norm, will undermine innovation. We evaluate this argument in a dynamic stochastic...

This Chapter discusses the tensions between copyright law and competition and some of the ways through which copyright law itself works to advance competition policy goals. It shows how competition policy goals and anti-monopoly measures shaped the design of copyright since the Statute of Anne,...

This article considers a gap between patent law and competition law that is being profitably exploited by "patent trolls", firms whose business is the acquisition and assertion of patents against parties who are already using the patented technology. First, we frame the discussion by considering...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between the technological proximity measures in three areas: USA, Japan and Europe. In each economic area, we use information from two international patent systems to construct the technological proximity for 240 international firms. In...

In 2015, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standardization Association made some controversial changes to its patent policy. The changes include a recommended method of calculation of FRAND royalty rates, and a request to members holding a standard essential patent...

US Supreme Court decisions in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics Inc. caused US and European law on what is patentable subject matter to diverge significantly. Both cases related to molecular tests and changed decades...

The paper compares and contrasts the patent-based indicators, traditionally used to assess a country’s technological capacities and specialization. It seeks to determine how a chosen metric might affect the results of such an analysis, sometimes being misleading. Empirically, the paper is...

Digital designs – that is, designs for display on electronic screens – have recently burst onto the intellectual property (IP) stage. While in the U.S. a smattering of legal studies have recently addressed the question of digital design as a copyright-, trademark- and patent-eligible subject...