Il GEIE "italiano" tra impresa e società

A quasi trent’anni dall’emanazione del Regolamento comunitario 2137/1985 che ne segna la data di nascita, e a venticinque dalla effettiva possibilità di costituzione, il gruppo europeo di interesse economico (GEIE) è ancora percepito, nella migliore delle ipotesi, come una specie di “oggetto misterioso” nel panorama giuridico italiano ed europeo. Lo scopo di questo studio, che ha beneficiato del sostegno economico della Commissione Europea e della Provincia autonoma di Trento nell’ambito del Settimo Programma Quadro, Azione Marie Curie COFUND, progetto “TRENTINO”, è di tentare una riconduzione ragionata del GEIE a categorie che siano di maggiore familiarità per il giurista italiano, indagandone le problematiche principali (su tutte l’assenza del beneficio della responsabilità limitata dei membri per le obbligazioni assunte dal gruppo) ed offrendo ipotesi di soluzione

Biodiversità agricola e tutela degli agricoltori dall'Hold-Up brevettuale: il caso degli OGM = Agricultural Biodiversity and the Protection of Farmers from Patent Hold-Up: The Case of GMOs

This paper analyzes the problems originating from patentability of modern agricultural biotechnology. The progressive and increasingly broad patent protection granted to such inventions, pose, in fact, serious risks in safeguarding biodiversity and protecting farmers. In the first part of the paper - after clarifying what is meant by biotechnology, new plant varieties and genetically modified organisms - a few international instruments are taken into consideration. Since the seventies, the need to protect the environment has been an issue of increasing concern for the international community. Among the initiatives designed to benefit the environment, fundamental are those directed at the conservation of biodiversity. In this view, of particular importance is the Convention of Biological Diversity and its Protocols. Particularly interesting are the initiatives aimed at the protection of agricultural biodiversity, enshrined in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), which create a system that seems in conflict with the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. In the second part of the paper the U.S. patent system is compared with the EU patent system, with regard to the patentability of biotechnology, in particularly new plant varieties and genetically modified organisms. In this area, the U.S. patent system offers a wider protection than the European one: the second one provides a farmer’s privilege, which allows farmers to conserve part of the self-reproducing patented material, in order to reuse it. The U.S. system also extends, by judicial decision, the patent protection for genetically modified plants, reducing the scope of patent exhaustion doctrine. In this system the interests of big biotechnology companies, strongly prevail over the interests of farmers, more and more depending on the firsts. A possible way to rebalance these relationships, would be the application of the patent misuse doctrine. In the Italian legal system, through the application of the abuse of economic dependence, the creation of such imbalances could be avoided. The patentability of agricultural biotechnology poses risks to biodiversity conservation and creates a situation where agriculture depends on biotechnology companies. To this end, some authors propose the creation of an open source system

Neolingua anno 2014

Come d'estate si vogliono tappare i buchi di bilancio e ripezzare l'universit

Open innovation e patent: un'analisi comparata

Questa tesi si pone come obiettivo primario quello di esplorare le prospettive di riconciliazione di due mondi solitamente visti in insanabile antagonismo: la filosofia dell'Open Innovation e l'istituto brevettuale. Nonostante siano entrambi appartenenti al medesimo “terreno di gioco” – quello delle invenzioni, dello sviluppo tecnologico e del progresso – i fautori dell'Open Innovation hanno sempre guardato con diffidenza al patent, considerandolo uno strumento giuridico eccessivamente rigido e non suscettibile di essere utilizzato in un'ottica di apertura. I primi due capitoli sono dedicati alla descrizione e all'approfondimento delle tematiche dell'Open Innovation e del brevetto per invenzione, al fine di fornire un quadro esauriente dei due poli della trattazione: nel primo capitolo si esamina il modello dell'Open Innovation, la sua evoluzione e le sue caratteristiche secondo Chesbrough ed altri suoi fautori, ma anche alcune critiche; inoltre, alcuni casi concreti aiutano a meglio comprendere gli effetti che un modello open può avere sulle imprese che lo adottano, rispetto a strategie di maggior chiusura. Il secondo capitolo si occupa invece del brevetto per invenzione, fornendo un'analisi della disciplina nazionale, internazionale, europea e statunitense e presentando le caratteristiche salienti di tale istituto della proprietà industriale. Si tratta di una figura fortemente armonizzata a livello internazionale, che tuttavia presenta alcuni interessanti spunti comparativi ove si mettano a confronto il sistema europeo e quello statunitense.Il terzo capitolo compie invece un doveroso approfondimento per quanto riguarda la brevettabilità di due categorie di invenzioni che negli ultimi decenni sono state, e sono tuttora, al centro del processo innovativo in ambito tecnologico: software e biotecnologie. Viene seguito un approccio incentrato sulle fonti normative e sulla casistica giurisprudenziale, mettendo a confronto l'evoluzione di tali settori tecnologici in ottica brevettuale, guardando al sistema europeo e a quello statunitense. Infine, gli ultimi due capitoli costituiscono il fulcro della trattazione: enucleano i principali punti di attrito tra Open Innovation e brevetti e tentano di fornire alcune soluzioni che si propongono di arginare tali problemi. La convivenza fra tali figure è infatti complicata dalla loro stessa natura, apparentemente antitetica: le caratteristiche proprie del brevetto rischiano infatti di generare una sedimentazione di titoli di proprietà industriale (c.d. patent thicket), la quale finisce per porre un freno all'innovazione e al progresso, impedendo lo sfruttamento e il miglioramento dell'invenzione. Alcune soluzioni che vengono proposte si avvalgono dello strumento della licenza per rendere maggiormente elastico l'istituto brevettuale: cross licences e patent pools consentono infatti una maggior circolazione delle invenzioni protette da brevetto, permettendo così l'implementazione di strategie di Open Innovation nonostante la presenza di titoli di privativa. Le ultime soluzioni presentate, invece, incidono maggiormente sulla natura del brevetto e relative licenze, prevedendo due modalità “creative” mediante le quali la conoscenza e la tecnologia potranno circolare senza eccessivi impedimenti; si tratta della Defensive Patent License e dei quasi- e semi-patents, figure che costituiscono i Partial Patents. Nonostante questi ultimi siano istituti che necessitano di transitare da una dimensione ancora principalmente teorica ad un'effettiva loro messa in pratica, hanno tutte le carte in regola per poter edificare un solido ponte che colleghi il mondo dell'Open Innovation a quello del brevetto, con grandi benefici per la certezza del diritto, la collettività e l'innovazione

Specifying Business Processes with Azzurra

A business process is above all else a social interaction among multiple participants. Business process modeling languages support the description of business processes in operational terms as collections of interleaved activities conducted by human and software agents. However, such descriptions do not capture adequately the richness of social interaction among participants. To address this deficiency, we propose Azzurra, a specification language for modeling and executing business processes. Azzurra is founded on social concepts, such as roles, agents and commitments among them, and Azzurra specifications are social models consisting of sets of commitments. As such, Azzurra specifications support flexible executions of business processes, and provide a semantic notion of actor accountability and business process compliance. In this paper, we present syntax and semantics of Azzurra, and we propose algorithms to determine run- time compliance with an Azzurra social specification

Mechanics of fragmentation of crocodile skin and other thin films

Fragmentation of thin layers of materials is mediated by a network of cracks on its surface. It is commonly seen in dehydrated paintings or asphalt pavements and even in graphene or other two-dimensional materials, but is also observed in the characteristic polygonal pattern on a crocodile’s head. Here, we build a simple mechanical model of a thin film and investigate the generation and development of fragmentation patterns as the material is exposed to various modes of deformation. We find that the characteristic size of fragmentation, defined by the mean diameter of polygons, is strictly governed by mechanical properties of the film material. Our result demonstrates that skin fragmentation on the head of crocodiles is dominated by that it features a small ratio between the fracture energy and Young’s modulus, and the patterns agree well with experimental observations. Understanding this mechanics-driven process could be applied to improve the lifetime and reliability of thin film coatings by mimicking crocodile skin

Policy sull’accesso aperto (Open Access) alla letteratura scientifica

On January 29th 2014 the University of Trento adopted an Open Access policy which applies to all its members and their publications (scientific literature), except the works destined to commercial publishing with payment of royalties (unless otherwise specified by the author). The policy consists in an Immediate Deposit and Optional Access (ID-OA) mandate: as soon as a work is accepted for publication, it must be deposited in the University Open Access Current Research Information System (CRIS) in the digital final accepted draft (whenever possible, the publisher’s proprietary PDF version). The deposit consists in the full text and bibliographic/contextual metadata. Upon careful check of the intellectual property rights, the work is published in OA through the University Institutional Open Access Repository, immediately after the deposit or within six (twelve for human or social sciences) months from the date of acceptance

Misure tecnologiche di protezione: cinquanta (e più) sfumature di grigio della Corte di giustizia europea = Technological protection Measures (Fifty and more) Shades of Grey of the European Court of Justice

The aim of this paper is to make some critical remarks on decision of January 23, 2014 C-355/12 (Nintendo) of the European Court of Justice, ruling on Article 6 of the Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC, which regulates the legal protection of technological protection measures (TPMs). In the first paragraph, I briefly introduce the subject. In the second paragraph, I summarize the interpretation given and the principles applied by the ECJ. In the third paragraph, I point out some weaknesses of the Court’s wisdom. In the fourth paragraph, I draw a different perspective on the legal protection of TPMs aimed at restricting the application of Art. 6. In the last paragraph, I propose some conclusions

Physics & Medicine: Toward a Future of Integration: Trento, November 6th – 8th, 2014

The relationship between physics and medicine has ancient roots that sink to the dawn of medicine with the use of physical techniques, like heat and light, to diagnose and treat diseases. In the 17th century, with the advent of the experimental method, the mechanistic description of nature was soon extended to living creatures. Physics contributed both to the establishment of new medical disciplines such as biomechanics, electrophysiology and ophthalmology and supported many other clinical practices and medical researches through the development of a huge number of physicsbased devices for clinical measurement, diagnosis and treatment. However, medical physics, as we usually understand the term, emerged as a distinct discipline in the 20th century in response to the growing use of ionizing radiation in both diagnosis and treatment. The urgent need to associate to the team of health professionals dealing with ionizing radiation a physicist with the central role of warrantor of the safe and effective use of radiation became soon evident and led to a new health-care profession: medical physics. The actual Conference “Physics & Medicine. Toward a future of integration” has been organized by the University of Trento, the Azienda Provinciale per i Servizi Sanitari of Trento and the Associazione Italiana di Fisica Medica. The goals of the meeting are: to review the current status of main topics of medical physics and give a vision of coming developments; to consider the profession and the role of the medical physicist projected in the new organizational models of health services; to analyze patterns of training and retraining of medical physicists as well as the basic training programs for future physicians; to discuss the contribution of research in physics as applied to medicine as an engine for innovation in health care

Finite element simulation of eddy current problems using magnetic scalar potentials

We propose a new implementation of the finite element approximation of eddy current problems using as principal unknown the magnetic field. In the non-conducting region a scalar magnetic potential is introduced. The method can deal automatically with any topological configuration of the conducting region and, being based on the search of a scalar magnetic potential in the non-conducting region, has the advantage of making use of a reduced number of unknowns. Several numerical tests are presented for illustrating the performance of the proposed method; in particular, the numerical simulation of a new type of transformer of complicated topological shape is shown