The current Chinese development model is nearing its limits. The World Bank has cautioned that China could find itself in a “middle-income trap”. China recognizes that it must dramatically increase its capacity for innovation to avoid this trap. This chapter provides an introduction to the...

Unmanned aerial vehicles — “UAVs” or “drones” — are increasingly becoming a mainstream commercial phenomenon and tool for a vast range of commercial consumer, prosumer, and professional activities. Given advances in automation and miniaturization generally — and flight control...

Although patents are the prototypical type of protection that most people consider applicable to protecting drugs, patents are just the most-established and well-known method available to protect drugs from competition. However, there are other types of mechanisms in regulatory laws that provide...

Commentators have poured forth a loud and sustained outcry over the past few years that sees property rule treatment of intellectual property (IP) as a cause of excessive transaction costs, thickets, anticommons, hold-ups, hold-outs, and trolls, which unduly tax and retard innovation,...

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, all countries having patent systems required patentable inventions to be both new and useful. Now those two fundamental requirements have been joined by a third: Patentable inventions must also be nonobvious. The nonobviousness requirement is...

This think piece examines the issue of patents and innovation in the light of both the TRIPS Agreement and the available evidence. After reviewing the raison d'être of the TRIPS Agreement, it focuses on what can be done within the confines of the WTO to ensure that patent protection stimulates...

Patents have long been regarded as the 'gold standard' of intellectual property protection. In 'Little patents and big secrets: managing intellectual property', Anton and Yao (2004) call this traditional view into question by finding that firms keep their most important innovations secret. This...

Traditionally patents are seen as the gold standard for intellectual property protection. But, in line with empirical findings that secrecy is considered more important for appropriating returns, recent theories predict that firms keep their most important inventions secret. This article...

This paper analyzes the consequences of radical patent-regime change by exploiting a natural experiment: the forced adoption of the Prussian patent system in territories annexed after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Compared to other German states, Prussia granted patents more restrictively by...