Since it was developed during the industrial revolution to protect material innovations, patent law often cannot be applied to intangible industrial inventions, such as software. International patent law must be adapted to cover the emerging virtual world, but this has not been done. Unsuited to modern innovation, the author argues that international patent law has reached a period of decline. This book explains why we have reached this situation, and how and why the international patent system must be modernised and rebalanced.

Throughout history famous researchers had innovative dreams that sometimes won them a Nobel Prize. Why did they get these dreams? Based on 20 years innovative work on the connections between dreams and reality and on the role played by the whole body in the innovative dream process, this revolutionary book answers many questions about scientific creativity and how to boost it. It explains why innovative dreams, ideas and intuitions occur and what blocks them. It reveals how researchers can place themselves in the best conditions to become discoverers. It teaches a powerful technique to provoke innovative dreams, ideas and intuitions instead of waiting for the stroke of luck.

Distinguished economists, political scientists, and legal experts discuss the implications of the increasingly globalized protection of intellectual property rights for the ability of countries to provide their citizens with such important public goods as basic research, education, public health, and environmental protection. Such items increasingly depend on the exercise of private rights over technical inputs and information goods, which could usher in a brave new world of accelerating technological innovation. However, higher and more harmonized levels of international intellectual property rights could also throw up high roadblocks in the path of follow-on innovation, competition and the attainment of social objectives. It is at best unclear who represents the public interest in negotiating forums dominated by powerful knowledge cartels. This is the first book to assess the public processes and inputs that an emerging transnational system of innovation will need to promote technical progress, economic growth and welfare for all participants.

An economy of services largely dominates our world today, but no patent system is available to support it. All signs point increasingly to evidence that in almost all countries—and as enshrined in the TRIPS Agreement—patent rules and procedures are seriously handicapped in their incapacity to respond to current economic reality. Many inventions today are made without any materiality, yet they are nonetheless genuine inventions, such as those that arise from the banking, insurance and business consulting industries. Today’s patent system remains deeply linked to the making of things with human hands. It must evolve and adapt so that the new economy can also benefit from its advantages. This book is about that adaptation—which will come, or, rather, as the author shows, has slowly started to come. By describing details and historical events that shed light on how patent law has evolved from the pre-industrial to the industrial economy, the book manifests the need for a further evolution of patents to the post-industrial economy.

Coalitions and Compliance examines how international changes can reconfigure domestic politics. Since the late 1980s, developing countries have been subject to intense pressures regarding intellectual property rights. These pressures have been exceptionally controversial in the area of pharmaceuticals. Historically, fearing the economic and social costs of providing private property rights over knowledge, developing countries did not allow drugs to be patented. Now they must do so, an obligation with significant implications for industrial development and public health. This book analyses different forms of compliance with this new imperative in Latin America, comparing the politics of pharmaceutical patenting in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Coalitions and Compliance focuses on two periods of patent politics: initial conflicts over how to introduce drug patents, and then subsequent conflicts over how these new patent systems function. In contrast to explanations of national policy choice based on external pressures, domestic institutions, or Presidents' ideological orientations, this book attributes cross-national and longitudinal variation to the ways that changing social structures constrain or enable political leaders' strategies to construct and sustain supportive coalitions. The analysis begins with assessment of the relative resources and capabilities of the transnational and national pharmaceutical sectors, and these rival actors' efforts to attract allies. Emphasis is placed on two ways that social structures are transformed so as to affect coalition-building possibilities: how exporters fearing the loss of preferential market access may be converted into allies of transnational drug firms, and differential patterns of adjustment among state and societal actors that are inspired by the introduction of new policies. It is within the changing structural conditions produced by these two processes that political leaders build coalitions in support of different forms of compliance.

The creation of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is the most prominent change in the European legal landscape for the last four decades. This book explains how the new system works in practice and how to make the best use of its provisions. It offers readers an in-depth and comprehensive commentary on the legal mechanisms of the upcoming ratified European Patent Law, and advice on potential problems that users of the forthcoming regulations may face. The book first describes the creation of the Unified European Patent Law and how its four new legislative texts interact. The new legislative texts are then explained and commented on in detail, rule by rule, with diverse approaches and perspectives from a practitioner team comprising patent litigators, European patent attorneys, law professors and patent judges. The Commentary takes into account the practical needs of users of the new system on both the prosecution and enforcement sides, addressing substantive and procedural problems. This book is the most authoritative text on the Unitary Patent and Unified Patents Court, and an invaluable tool for practitioners in this rapidly developing area of law.

The book describes how intellectual property law is framed by theories about incentives, trade, health, development, and human rights.

Provides an overview of intellectual property law, including what legal rights apply to a work, what trade-secret law protects, and the scope of copyright protection. A plain-English guide to intellectual property law.

"Law school casebook on intellectual property in a global context"--