Intellectual Property Database Research Articles

Legal Protection for Registered Trademark Holders Against Trademark Infringement

In the era of development aligned with international conventions, the role of brands has become crucial in maintaining business competition and must comply with existing trademark regulations. Legislation regarding trademarks in Indonesia has undergone numerous changes to adapt to the needs and developments of the times, starting with Law No. 14 of 1997 concerning Trademarks, amended by Law No. 15 of 2001 concerning Trademarks, and most recently, Law No. 20 of 2016 concerning Trademarks and Geographical Indications. For consumers, a brand not only facilitates identification but also serves as a symbol of self-esteem. Individuals accustomed to choosing products from a particular brand tend to continue using that brand for various reasons, such as familiarity, trustworthiness, product quality, and more. Thus, the function of a brand as a guarantee of quality becomes increasingly evident, especially concerning reputable products. This research adopts a normative juridical research approach. The findings of this study indicate that legal protection for trademarks is granted, whether foreign or local, famous or not, only to registered trademarks. Therefore, every brand owner is encouraged to register their trademark with the Directorate General of Intellectual Property Rights to obtain legal protection for their brand. Legal protection based on the first-to-file principle is provided to registered trademark holders with ‘good faith’ both in a preventive and repressive manner. Considerations by the judge in deciding trademark infringement cases, as in Decision Number: 1349 K/Pdt.Sus-HKI/2022, are as follows: The plaintiff alleges ownership of the ERG trademark (ERG logo) with Registration Number IDM000540156, dated March 8, 2014, in class 25 to protect footwear and apparel products. The naming of ERG is based on the plaintiff’s idea to design and develop ergonomic products. Therefore, the translation information in the intellectual property database for the ERG trademark is ergonomic fashion products. The plaintiff claims that the defendants have infringed the trademark by using the ERG mark, which is substantially or entirely identical to the plaintiff’s ERG mark, Registration Number IDM000540156 owned by Mr. Muhamad Adi Mulya Pranata without rights and unlawfully

Intellectual property protection as the non-financial asset of a family business in the Czech Republic

Long-term experience, surveys, and statistics show that family businesses mostly lack strategies of protecting their intellectual property. Tradition, experience, family recipes, the name, and the brand of a family business are the basic prerequisite for its sustainability in future generations. The objective of this paper is to evaluate whether the existence of patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property is dependent on the length of time family businesses have been active on the market. The paper also addresses the question of whether there is a relationship between the existence of different forms of intellectual property and the amount of government support drawn down. The uniqueness of this paper lies in the compilation and statistical evaluation of a unique intellectual property database of 740 registered family businesses in the Czech Republic and is the first academic paper on this topic in the country.

Knowledge diffusion channels in Brazil: The effect of inventor mobility and inventive collaboration on regional invention

AbstractThe main goal of this paper is to evaluate the role of inventor mobility and inventive collaboration in Brazilian regional innovation. We take into account the regional knowledge production function (RKPF) to incorporate the regional interactions promoted by these two important knowledge diffusion channels. Using a dynamic panel with data from a unique combination of the Intellectual Property Database for Statistical Purposes (BADEPI v1.0) and the Annual Social Information Report of the Labor Ministry (RAIS), we estimate the interregional inventor mobility and co‐invention using a Poisson‐Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimator, and the RKPF using a system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator. Our results show that: (a) space exerts a relevant influence on an inventor’s decision to migrate and to collaborate to innovate; (b) inventor mobility among Brazilian regions promotes regional innovation; (c) regional collaboration significantly contributes to regional innovation.

Recent Patents on the Industrial Application of Alpha-amylases

Alpha-amylases are enzymes capable of degrading polysaccharides, such as starch and glycogen. Found in various organisms, such as fungi and bacteria, these enzymes have great biotechnological potential due to their insertion in several industrial sectors ranging from food to biofuels. The aim of this study was to analyze patents deposited in intellectual property databases on alpha-amylases in the fields of food, beverages, detergents, animal feeds, biofuels, pharmaceuticals and textiles, with the search period being 5 years. This study targeted the use of alpha-amylases in various industrial sectors, so searches were carried out on the intellectual property database Espacenet website (European Patent Office - EPO) which contains more than 90 million patents deposited in its database. During the search for patents filed in the last 5 years, 186 were found related to the use of alpha-amylases. These were disturbed as follows: 84 (biofuel), 41 (drinks), 16 (pharmaceuticals), 15 (detergents), 11 (food), 10 (animal feed), 9 (textiles). From the total number of patents found, we selected 6 from each area, except pharmaceutical products, to discuss and provide information on the application of this enzyme. This study demonstrated that the sectors of beverages and animal feed have preferences for thermostable alpha-amylases while sectors such as food, biofuels and textiles only regarded the importance of enzymatic efficiency. The detergent sector presented the greatest use of alpha-amylases which had distinct biochemical characteristics as solvent resistance and thermostability. The pharmaceutical sector was the one that presented less patents related to the application of alpha amylases. In addition, this work showed that China is the country with the highest patent registration for the use of alpha-amylases in the analyzed period.

Network Analysis of Innovation in the Internet of Things

Background: In the Internet of Things (IoT) firms, innovation beyond the border of a company is important. Furthermore, advantageous positioning in the innovation network is thought to enhance the result of innovation and ultimately contribute to profit. Objectives: The objective of this research is to clarify empirically the influence of the network structure among companies on innovation in the IoT field. Method: In this research, the relationship between the network structure and the result of innovation was analysed through social network analysis. Joint application patents related to the IoT companies were extracted from the intellectual property database. Results: As a result, the difference in the network structure of a company was related to the result of research and profitability. In particular, a company with a platform type of business model is considered highly profitable in the IoT business field. Conclusion: Drawing on an intellectual property database and employing social network analysis, this research quantifies the structure of innovation networks in terms of the results and operational efficiency of R&D.

THE NETWORK STRUCTURE BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONS AND THE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY OF DRUG DEVELOPMENT

The sharp rise in health-care costs is compressing the public finance in various countries today, and an increase in the efficiency of the research and development of pharmaceutical products is required. In order to increase the efficiency of drug development, open innovation through external cooperation between drug manufacturing companies is attracting attention. However, the research findings of previous researches are not necessarily the same regarding the size of the effect of external cooperation between drug manufacturing companies. It is assumed that differences in the kinds of pharmaceutical products and in the mode of inter-organisational relations are two of the causes of the variation in the research findings. For example, with regard to the interorganisational relation mode, the operational efficiency of a horizontal international specialization style is high in the IT industry, and the operational efficiency of a vertical integration style is high in the motor industry. Thus, in this research, pharmaceutical products were classified appropriately and the inter-organisational relation fit for each was clarified empirically. As a method of research, from the intellectual-property database, the joint-application patents for the past ten years were extracted, and the inter-organisational relation was analysed by using the method of social network analysis. As a result, when the pharmaceutical products were classified using the conventional polymer formulation, the bio-drug development and the dosage-form development, the effect of external cooperation changed with differences in product characteristics. In addition, it became clear that the modes of external cooperation fit for each difference.

Emigration of Innovative Workforce in the Light of Patent Data

The study uses patent data statistics from World Intellectual Property Database (WIPO) to reveal emigration of innovative workforce issue which has adverse effects on the economies of origin countries. Statistical data indicate that emigration of innovative workforce is not only a problem for developing countries but also it is a problem for developed nations as well. The study directly refers to the mobility of inventors since it uses the patent data statistics. Elimination of spillover effects that might be obtained by the new inventions from a Schumpeterian point of view, loss of the most important segment of human capital and characteristics of emigrant receiving and sending countries are also discussed in the study. To prevent emigration of high skilled workforce particularly the inventors, the study discusses the effects of active labor market policies as a measure. The study therefore aims to stress the importance of retaining innovative workforce and attract as many as possible to improve potential of economy by using data analysis and literature review methods.

Investigating inventive productivity at Sweden's largest medical university

The evaluation of technology transfer activities by patents is a common approach to university benchmarking. However, the underlying counts are not always transparent or harmonised. The aim of this article is to explore different ways to measure inventive productivity. Based on the novel Karolinska Institutet Intellectual Property database (KIIP), we investigate inventive productivity at Sweden’s largest medical university between 1995 and 2010. We find that the selection of different patent records affects the representation of inventive productivity. Moreover, our results show that an exclusive focus on number of patents rather than also including the number of inventions generates a considerably different result in terms of inventive productivity. Our results point to the need to critically review patent metrics applied by universities and policy makers to evaluate university technology transfer.

WIPO and the cobbler's children

There is an old adage which owes its origin to those far-off times when shoes were made and maintained by craftsmen, not mass-produced in far-off lands, to the effect that it is the children of the cobbler—who repairs the shoes of others—who go barefoot. So preoccupied is the cobbler with the needs of others that his family’s own needs go unmet. Much the same might be said for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations agency charged with responsibility for ‘Encouraging Creativity and Innovation’, so quotes the slogan on its home page. At the time of writing, it was more than four months since WIPO was informed of the existence of a rogue website giving an address in Prague, Czech Republic, which boasted a logo and artwork that strongly resembled those of WIPO but offered an expensive and effectively worthless directory entry. Within IP circles, considerable disquiet has been expressed with regard to the operation of a site which, had it been as brazen in its mimicry of a private sector business, would surely have been the subject of vigorous litigation to suppress it. This episode, however it ends, has raised several issues which this editorial summarizes below. First, is the protection of the symbols of international bodies under Article 6ter of the Paris Convention sufficient for WIPO’s purposes? That provision harks back to a heraldic age and appears to impose duties upon countries of the Paris Union rather than to confer actionable rights in regard to the abuse of protected flags, emblems, and so forth under the Convention. At least one other United Nations agency, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has registered both words and devices as trade marks, suggesting that it must have seen some advantage in doing so, in contrast with the position given by one WIPO official that the registration of its restyled logo as a trade mark in 2010 was ‘neither necessary nor useful’. In any event, Article 6ter protection would not appear to cover the imitation on one website of the artwork deployed on another. Copyright owned by national governments and international organizations does not in fact appear to be protected under any international convention, including the two so-called Internet Treaties of 1996. Secondly, the question has been raised as to whether the powers vested in WIPO under the WIPO Convention extend so far as to enable it to embark upon litigation in national courts at all. Thirdly, it remains unclear what provision WIPO makes with regard to the monitoring, protection, and enforcement of its own rights since there appears to have been no clear statement from that body. Fourthly, no footnote is required for the proposition that we live in an age when infringement and counterfeiting is rampant—a proposition which many of us need look further than our spam-boxes for verification. Given that WIPO has gone to such great lengths to promote and emphasize the importance of IP rights, to educate governments, businesses, creators, and even sometimes consumers as to their importance, some members of the IP community were hoping to see strong leadership by WIPO itself in powerfully decrying the sort of practices carried out by its imitator. The feelings of those who have been misled into paying over substantial sums of money in consequence of their having been confused or deceived are not recorded, but some of their professional representatives have expressed great annoyance at what appears to be a lengthy period of silence and inactivity. WIPO has, to its credit, maintained and updated a page on its website under the rubric ‘WARNING: Requests for Payment of Fees’, which lists bodies that invite payment of fees for non-official services. Indeed, Prague’s World Intellectual Property Database features three times on it. But how many people know of its existence? It receives little overt publicity. I believe that WIPO can do much to emphasize the importance of IP rights by giving a higher priority to the protection of its own. There is at least one precedent for this at United Nations level, where the World Health Organization has a policy of not recruiting cigarette smokers on account of the proven danger to health which that practice engenders. This shows that the WHO not only supports a set of policies but lives them. It is hoped that WIPO will do so too. Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, 2011, Vol. 6, No. 4 EDITORIAL 199