IP Protection Research Articles

Regulating Transformative Technology in The Quantum Age: Intellectual Property, Standardization & Sustainable Innovation

Regulating Transformative Technology in The Quantum Age: Intellectual Property, Standardization & Sustainable Innovation

The level of perception, awareness, and behavior on intellectual property protection: A study of the emerging country

Emerging economies are facing problems in the administration and compliance with intellectual property protection in their countries. The IP term is now much more familiar to the public, but it is not well understood completely in a lawful way. The public is misinformed (or, at best, under-informed) about IP leading to higher levels of infringement as well as reducing the use and value of IP. Our study aimed to determine the level of perceptions, awareness, and behavior (PAB) on IP Protection of the medical technology students with the cross-sectional on-line survey on 795 students by electronic European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) questionnaire. The overall level of PAB was very high, greater than three quarters. The demographic factors related significantly to right PAB on IP protection were sex (female higher than male) and residency (other cities higher than Ho Chi Minh City). Only the awareness had the covariance with the behavior in structural equation modeling (SEM) model with a significant coefficient of 0.55. We should focus on an education program to increase the right awareness, then it would improve the right behavior on intellectual property protection in students who are living in the emerging countries.

Research on Optimization of Blockchain Network and Data Communication in the Ecological Structure of Sports Industry

Problems such as excessive centralization of sports industry operations, unclear value, and lack of IP protection hinder the benign interaction between various formats of the sports industry and the healthy operation of the industrial ecosystem. This article is aimed at studying the use of the decentralization, openness and transparency, smart contracts, copyright traceability, and other characteristics of the BT to construct a PCMR model, which can solve the pain points faced by the sports industry ecosystem in a targeted manner, and forming a way to reconstruct trust, the specific implementation path of the integration of BT and sports industry with mechanism as the core. This paper proposes blockchain network and data communication algorithms such as consensus algorithm, signature core algorithm, and practical Byzantine fault‐tolerant algorithm to provide technical support for the application of blockchain technology in the sports industry ecosystem and, at the same time, provide technical support for blockchain network and data communication. The feasibility analysis of the application of the sports industry ecosystem is proposed, and the implementation path of the blockchain network and data communication to reconstruct the sports industry ecosystem is analyzed. Finally, the empirical test of the support of blockchain sports to the sports industry is carried out. By analyzing the panel data of 240 observations of 48 listed companies in 5 years as a sample of the sports industry, the experimental results show that the dominant modulus of the sample does not have other differences, and the leftovers all pass significance test at the 10% level at least, denoting that the fundamental sample is more rational.

A Social Justice Perspective on IP Protection for Artificial Intelligence Programs

A Social Justice Perspective on IP Protection for Artificial Intelligence Programs

ThermoTag: A Hidden ID of 3D Printers for Fingerprinting and Watermarking

To address the increasing challenges of counterfeit detection and IP protection for 3D printing, we propose that every 3D printer holds unique fingerprinting features characterized by the thermodynamic properties of the extruder hot-end and can be used as a new way of 3D watermarking. We prove that these physical fingerprints resulting from manufacturing imperfections and system variations exhibit distinct heating responses, namely “ThermoTag,” which can be represented as the distinguishable thermodynamic processes and, ultimately, the temperature readings during the preheating process. Experimental results show that, by only changing the hot-ends of the same model on the same 3D printer, we can achieve about 92% identification accuracy amongst 45 hot-ends. The permanence and robustness of ThermoTag for the same hot-end were examined, throughout a period of one month with hundreds of trials under different environmental temperature settings. Leveraging the hidden ThermoTag, an example of watermarking scheme in 3D printing is presented and evaluated.

Deep Model Intellectual Property Protection via Deep Watermarking

Despite the tremendous success, deep neural networks are exposed to serious IP infringement risks. Given a target deep model, if the attacker knows its full information, it can be easily stolen by fine-tuning. Even if only its output is accessible, a surrogate model can be trained through student-teacher learning by generating many input-output training pairs. Therefore, deep model IP protection is important and necessary. However, it is still seriously under-researched. In this work, we propose a new model watermarking framework for protecting deep networks trained for low-level computer vision or image processing tasks. Specifically, a special task-agnostic barrier is added after the target model, which embeds a unified and invisible watermark into its outputs. When the attacker trains one surrogate model by using the input-output pairs of the barrier target model, the hidden watermark will be learned and extracted afterwards. To enable watermarks from binary bits to high-resolution images, a deep invisible watermarking mechanism is designed. By jointly training the target model and watermark embedding, the extra barrier can even be absorbed into the target model. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed framework, which can resist attacks with different network structures and objective functions.

Fashion Design and Intellectual Property Rights: An Indian Perspective

IP protection to fashion design is in a transition phase due to the uncertainties as to the protection and the awareness of the same among fashion designers. In addition to this, there is a significant overlapping of the Design Act, 2000 and the Copyright Act, 1957, when it comes to protecting design. The filing trends of design is not categorically analysed backed by a viable approach to promote design protection. Against this background, the present article is an attempt to locate various issues involved in the protection of fashion design, covering its evolution, available, protections, overlapping of relevant legislations, design piracy and undertake an analysis of the recent filing trends in fashion design domain and possible suggestions.

Analysis of Knockoff Culture and the need for IP protection in the Fashion Industry in India

The present paper analyzes the role of intellectual property protection vis-a-vis the fashion industry. The Piracy Paradox coined by law professors Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman in the United States has led to imitation becoming an inescapable reality for designers all around the world on the astonishing pretext that is “imitation sparks innovation.” Presenting a critique of the Paradox in the Indian scenario in Part 1 of the paper, the author stresses upon the need for securing proper laws to protect the heart of the fashion industry, that is original artistic expressions. In Part 2 of the paper, whilst examining judicial decisions in India, the author argues that the present laws are riddled with loopholes that have resulted in a proliferation of cheap knock-offs that not only hamper the creative process of a brand, but negatively impact its exclusive reputation as well as its revenue. The infamous idea presented by the Piracy Paradox coupled with a lacunae in the laws have cost not only big fashion brands and designers but also disrupted the emergence of businesses in the nascent stages. To conclude, solutions have been proposed to dismantle the notion propounded by the Piracy Paradox and strengthen the laws in place to ensure fair and just competition in the economy.

Electronic Evidence in Intellectual Property Disputes under the Council of Europe’s Guidelines

On 30 January 2019 the Council of Europe adopted guidelines on electronic evidence in civil and administrative law accompanied by the Explanatory Memorandum. The authors summarize and analyse this soft law instrument with respect to intellectual property (hereinafter “IP”) disputes. They explain why its creation is important for the proper administration of justice and how it addresses and reflects technological developments, new business models and evolving case-law. Several conclusions have been identified regarding how use of the Guidelines will address current practical problems for courts in IP disputes. Both authors took active part in the preparatory works and believe it is in the interest of justice and effective IP protection that these guidelines are publicly available in the member states and widely disseminated among professionals dealing with electronic evidence.

Role of IP Due Diligence in Patent Area under Chinese Jurisdiction

With the advent of economic globalization, a growing number of countries have realized the value of IPRs in enhancing their competitiveness in the world economy. Intellectual property protection has become a worldwide concern in terms of cross-border competition. The acceleration in technology development and money-spinning compensation in lawsuit makes patents particularly crucial among other IPRs for a company to compete towards market rivals. IPDD is of great legal importance in terms of listing, M&A, independent R&D and infringement lawsuits. IP assets, including but not limited to patents drive many high technology strategies. For a variety of reasons, too many high-tech companies own patent rights without having an accurate understanding of the true value and real/potential risks associated with their patent portfolios or without initially developing and executing an assessment to thoroughly understand what their patent portfolios will entail. Serious consequences of IP due diligence failures take place again and again. As a consequence, it is of particular importance to conduct specific IPDD based on different needs in different scenarios. From the perspective of patent rights, the IPDD project mainly includes dealing with patentable subject matter, patentability requirements, scope of protection, prosecution of patent applications, and, e.g. enforcement and patent litigation. All these issues find a close match in statutory rules and their court interpretation. Thereby the sight for many issues decisive for successful exploitation of patents, but also all other forms of IP rights, as well as the reasons underlying their justification, often fall short. This applies to decisions such as: whether to invest into a risky RD whether and where to file and prosecute a patent application; whether to exploit a patent in own manufacturing activity, or to use it as a strategic tool against competitors; whether to license or assign a patent to a third party, or whether to take a license, or acquire a third party patent; finally, e.g., whether to acquire or not to acquire a company or to merge with it, in view of its patent portfolio. Taken these into consideration, the main discussion of the thesis includes the discussions on the objectives and limitations of IPDD, the instrument of IPDD and the role of due diligence in different scenarios. The study shows that conducting an IPDD will not only provide a pre-warning of a potential IP infringement but also assist in building up a promising business plan. IPDD can also help a company to determine the nature of IP protection in demand, estimate the possibility of IP disputes, avoid pitfalls in M&A and minimize the damage in the event the infringement established. For China, an IP latecomer, the experience and development of other jurisdictions may shed some light on how to make full use of IPDD in China. However, it is not advisable to transplant the other jurisdiction into China’s legislation totally and uncritically. China's IP protection system still leaves room for the judicial practice to evolve in many aspects. The full utilization of IPDD needs to be refined in the ongoing practice in conjunction with China's national conditions.

Using web content analysis to create innovation indicators—What do we really measure?

This study explores the use of web content analysis to build innovation indicators from the complete texts of 79 corporate websites of Canadian nanotechnology and advanced materials firms. Indicators of four core concepts (R&D, IP protection, collaboration, and external financing) of the innovation process were built using keywords frequency analysis. These web-based indicators were validated using several indicators built from a classic questionnaire-based survey with the following methods: correlation analysis, multitraits multimethods (MTMM) matrices, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results suggest that formative indices built with the questionnaire and web-based indicators measure the same concept, which is not the case when considering the items from the questionnaire separately. Web-based indicators can act either as complements to direct measures or as substitutes for broader measures, notably the importance of R&D and the importance of IP protection, which are normally measured using conventional methods, such as government administrative data or questionnaire-based surveys.

Technical Assistance As a Hedge to Intellectual Property Exclusivity

This article develops the connection between neo-colonialism and IP. The TRIPS Agreement and other hard norms such as TRIPS-plus bilateral treaties concluded between the EU, the USA and developing countries further contribute towards such neo-colonial control. Even so, an often overlooked but important aspect of such control is that once these treaties have been concluded, the EU, the USA and other co-opted international organizations such as WIPO actively offer technical assistance. The policy of technical assistance has often been criticized for introducing levels of IP protection that are mostly inappropriate for the social and economic development of developing countries. This chapter argues that technical assistance – as a third layer of norms, in addition to existing multilateral, mega-regional and bilateral agreements – has become the ‘new informality’ emphasized in the new constitutionalist literature. Technical assistance programmes further hedge IP exclusivity by creating an elite IP community in developing countries that sees things through the dominant industrialized-country approach, effectively leading to epistemic lock-in. Technical assistance, therefore, functions as a facilitator of the constitutionalization of IP rights.

LedgerDB

The emergence of Blockchain has attracted widespread attention. However, we observe that in practice, many applications on permissioned blockchains do not benefit from the decentralized architecture. When decentralized architecture is used but not required, system performance is often restricted, resulting in low throughput, high latency, and significant storage overhead. Hence, we propose LedgerDB on Alibaba Cloud, which is a centralized ledger database with tamper-evidence and non-repudiation features similar to blockchain, and provides strong auditability. LedgerDB has much higher throughput compared to blockchains. It offers stronger auditability by adopting a TSA two-way peg protocol, which prevents malicious behaviors from both users and service providers. LedgerDB supports verifiable data removals demanded by many real-world applications, which are able to remove obsolete records for storage saving and hide records for regulatory purpose, without compromising its verifiability. Experimental evaluation shows that LedgerDB's throughput is 80X higher than state-of-the-art permissioned blockchain (i.e., Hyperledger Fabric). Many blockchain customers (e.g., IP protection and supply chain) on Alibaba Cloud have switched to LedgerDB for its high throughput, low latency, strong auditability, and ease of use.

University Regulations, Regional Development, and Technology Transfer: The Case of Brazil

In this study, we explore how the quality of university internal regulations and regional economic development impact new patent applications and licensing agreements in the context of Brazilian universities. To do that, we rely on data from a recent survey conducted by the Brazilian Innovation and Technology Transfer Managers National Forum (FORTEC Innovation Survey). Employing negative binomial models, we find that the quality of technology- transfer-related regulations has a positive impact on both patenting and licensing activities. In turn, the availability of regulations per se has no (or only little) effect on technology transfer outcomes. We also find that regional economic development has a negative impact on patenting outcomes. On the other hand, universities located in regions with higher levels of economic and innovative activity generate more licensing agreements. Finally, our results suggest that the marginal effects of the quality of both IP protection and licensing regulations is higher in more developed regions. These findings have important implications for both theory and practice.

Numerical investigation of the integration of heat transfer devices into wind towers

The purpose of this study is to incorporate heat transfer devices inside the passive terminal of a wind tower unit, highlighting the potential to achieve minimal restriction in the external air flow stream while ensuring maximum contact time, thus optimising the cooling duty of the device. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was used to develop a numerical model of a wind tower system and simulate the air flow pattern around and through the device to the test room. Results have indicated that the average internal airflow rate was reduced following the integration of the vertical and horizontal heat transfer device configuration, reductions of 4.11 % and 8.21 % was obtained respectively. Furthermore, the proposed cooling system was capable of reducing the air temperatures by up to 15 K. The technology presented here is subject to IP protection under the QNRF funding guidelines.

The Existing European IP Rights System and the Data Economy – An Overview With Particular Focus on Data Access and Portability

In contrast to earlier contributions on existing IP protection and the data economy this paper takes a targeted approach. The author focuses on the impact of the existing EU IP regime (copyright, sui generis protection of databases, patents and trade secrets protection) on access to and portability of data. Accordingly, the paper, first, deals with the question of how to keep data portability infrastructures open and accessible. Secondly, the paper discusses how to accommodate the different existing or proposed data access regimes or discussed case groups for access regulation with EU IP law, in particular with sui generis protection of databases and trade secrets protection. As for future perspectives, the paper, thirdly, identifies certain elements in the existing IP regime which might prove helpful as building blocks for the future regulation of the data economy.

Innovation institutions and the opioid crisis.

The US has recently—and belatedly—come to recognize opioid addiction as a public health crisis. What has gone mostly unrecognized is the degree to which this crisis is intertwined with US intellectual property law and related elements of US innovation policy. Innovation institutions—the legal arrangements that structure incentives for production and allocation of knowledge goods—encouraged the development and commercialization of addictive painkillers, restricted access to opioid antidotes, and (perhaps most importantly) failed to facilitate investments in alternative, nonaddictive treatments for chronic pain. Although innovation policy does not bear all the blame for the opioid wave that has washed over communities across the country, innovation institutions are bound up in the ongoing epidemic to a degree that so far has gone underappreciated.This article examines the proliferation of opioid use and abuse through the lens of innovation policy, and it envisions ways in which innovation institutions could help to contain the crisis. Along the way, it seeks to derive broader lessons for innovation policy scholarship as well as recommendations for institutional reform. The opioid crisis challenges the conventional understanding of IP law as a trade-off between allocative efficiency and dynamic efficiency; it highlights the potentially pernicious role of IP protection for addictive and habit-forming products; and it exposes deep flaws in the structure of federal subsidies for and regulation of prescription drugs. It also draws attention to the political and cultural factors that contribute to innovation policy failures. Ultimately, the opioid crisis underscores both the urgency and the limits of institutional change in the innovation policy domain.

University regulations, regional development and technology transfer: The case of Brazil

In this study, we explore how the interplay of the quality of university regulations and regional economic development impacts new patent applications and licensing agreements in the context of Brazilian universities. To do that, we rely on data from a recent survey conducted by the Brazilian Innovation and Technology Transfer Managers National Forum (FORTEC Innovation Survey). Employing negative binomial models, we find that the quality of technology-transfer-related regulations has a positive impact on both patenting and licensing activities, whereas the mere existence of those regulations has no (or only little) effect on technology transfer outcomes. This suggests that the presence of regulations per se may not provide (i) the incentive necessary to outweighing the opportunity costs and motivate academics to engage in technology transfer; and/or (ii) the necessary level of clarity, flexibility and consistency to mitigate uncertainties and transaction costs for both firms and university inventors. We also find a negative relationship between regional economic development and patenting outcomes. In contrast, we determine that universities located in regions with higher levels of economic and innovative activity generate more licensing agreements. Finally, our results suggest that the marginal effects of the quality of both IP protection and licensing regulations are higher in more developed regions.

The WIPO-WTO Relationship

Abstract The current, prevailing narrative on the WIPO-WTO relationship refers to “forum-shifting”. The idea is that developed countries moved from WIPO to WTO in order to obtain stronger IP protection at the international level by joining trade talks with IP negotiations. As a result, WTO would have become the main international forum for trade-related IP issues. This paper argues that the forum-shifting narrative, despite its merits, may fail to catch the complexity of WIPO-WTO relationship. Moreover, long-standing issues, as well as recent developments in trade and IP, demonstrate that the two Organizations have been characterized by continuity and constitute in reality interdependent, complementary fora. This is not to deny the differences existing between WIPO and WTO nor to discard the merits of the forum-shifting theory. Nonetheless, it is argued, it is time to move beyond it in order to grasp the implications of the WIPO-WTO relationship towards future international economic governance.

THE IMPACT OF TRIPS ON IPRs PROTECTION IN JORDAN, AS A PRIME EXAMPLE OF A DEVELOPING COUNTRY

In the last few decades, the developing countries have witnessed a remarkable increase in the infringement of intellectual property rights thus conventions and treaties were held to reduce these infringements, in particular, the TRIPS Treaty (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights).This study attempts to explain the causes of intellectual property rights infringements and the efficient means for intellectual property rights protections by taking Jordan as an example. The study finds that TRIPS Treaty, which is the latest international action to enhance the protection level, consumer's ethical attitude, development expenditure, economic policies, weakness of law enforcement, and low-income in developing countries are important factors to explain the level of IP protection. Because of all of these, the infringements became a phenomenon in developing countries that firstly need amendments in their intellectual property laws to apply the criminal sanctions jointly by civil remedies, owing to the fact of the shock value or general deterrence to enhance the commitment to the law and to remit this phenomenon, furthermore, the state will follow up on the cost of prosecution without involving the owners of the rights personally in many cases. On the other hand, literature revealed that the infringements of IPRs became a phenomenon because the TRIPS Treaty prepared for the benefits of the large companies, thus the developing countries' legislation, economic and consumer's ethical attitude got affected negatively. In addition, the developed countries threatened them by sanctions if they didn't make retroactively amendments on their legislation, which also led to prevent them to adopt the necessary measures that mitigate the negative impact on their economic and social life. Regarding the applied research method, this paper used secondary data sources and applied the descriptive and comparative analytical legal approaches to illustrate the most important points and findings on the topic.