Brexit Implications for Geographical Indications for Food and Beverages

Considers how Brexit may affect protection of geographical indications (GI) for food and beverages in the UK. Reviews the remaining uncertainties, the scope for supplementary protection through passing off actions, the position of European GIs in the UK, the possible impact of a UK-US trade agreement, and whether the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the European Union 2016 offers a GI model for future UK-EU relations

China's intellectual property rights commitments in the WTO: legal and economic implications

This article assesses the compliance of China's domestic laws in the area of intellectual property rights protection with the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which China obliged to accept upon its entrance into the WTO. It also discusses the implications which result from the implementation and enforcement of the intellectual property rights in China for doing business in China. The significance of intellectual property rights protection for achieving the strategic objects formulated by China's policy-makers and China's reputation in the world is tackled, as well. Qualitative research based on the concept of compliance showed that China's compliance with its TRIPS obligation should be evaluated with respect to different country-specific as well as country non-specific factors. However, the experience from the historical development of the leading world inventors, such as Japan or the United Kingdom, should also be considered.Web of Science4134

Socio-Economic Mechanisms to Coordinate the Internet of Services: The Simulation Environment SimIS

Visions of 21st century information systems show highly specialized digital services and resources, which interact continuously and with a global reach. Especially with the emergence of technologies, such as the semantic web or software agents, intelligent services within these settings can be implemented, automatically communicating and negotiating over the Internet about digital resources without human intervention. Such environments will eventually realize the vision of an open and global Internet of Services (IoS). In this paper we present an agent-based simulation model and toolkit for the IoS: 'SimIS - Simulating an Internet of Services'. Employing SimIS, distributed management mechanisms and protocols can be investigated in a simulated IoS environment before their actual deployment.Multi-Agent Simulation, Internet, Simulation Tools

Socionics: Sociological Concepts for Social Systems of Artificial (and Human) Agents

Socionics is an interdisciplinary approach with the objective to use sociological knowledge about the structures, mechanisms and processes of social interaction and social communication as a source of inspiration for the development of multi-agent systems, both for the purposes of engineering applications and of social theory construction and social simulation. The approach has been spelled out from 1998 on within the Socionics priority program funded by the German National research foundation. This special issue of the JASSS presents research results from five interdisciplinary projects of the Socionics program. The introduction gives an overview over the basic ideas of the Socionics approach and summarizes the work of these projects.Socionics, Sociology, Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Social Systems, Hybrid Systems, Social Simulation

Analysing B2B electronic procurement benefits – Information systems perspective

This paper presents electronic procurement benefits identified in four case companies. The benefits achieved in the case companies were classified according to taxonomies from the Information Systems discipline. Existing taxonomies were combined into a new taxonomy which allows evaluation of the complex e-procurement impact. Traditional financial-based methods failed to capture the nature of e-procurement benefits. In the new taxonomy, eprocurement benefits are classified using scorecard dimensions (strategic, tactical and operational), which allows the identification of areas of e-procurement impact, in addition the benefits characteristic is captured (tangible, intangible, financial and non-financial)

Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)

Based on a survey questionnaire administered to 1478 R&D labs in the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1994, we find that firms typically protect the profits due to invention with a range of mechanisms, including patents, secrecy, lead time advantages and the use of complementary marketing and manufacturing capabilities. Of these mechanisms, however, patents tend to be the least emphasized by firms in the majority of manufacturing industries, and secrecy and lead time tend to be emphasized most heavily. A comparison of our results with the earlier survey findings of Levin et al. [1987] suggest that patents may be relied upon somewhat more heavily by larger firms now than in the early 1980s. For the protection of product innovations, secrecy now appears to be much more heavily employed across most industries than previously. Our results on the motives to patent indicate that firms patent for reasons that often extend beyond directly profiting from a patented innovation through either its commercialization or licensing. In addition to the prevention of copying, the most prominent motives for patenting include the prevention of rivals from patenting related inventions (i.e., patent blocking'), the use of patents in negotiations and the prevention of suits. We find that firms commonly patent for different reasons in discrete' product industries, such as chemicals, versus complex' product industries, such as telecommunications equipment or semiconductors. In the former, firms appear to use their patents commonly to block the development of substitutes by rivals, and in the latter, firms are much more likely to use patents to force rivals into negotiations.

Implementing Privacy Negotiations in E-Commerce

This paper examines how service providers may resolve the trade-off between their personalization efforts and users' individual privacy concerns. Finding that neither an optimized one-size-fits-all strategy, nor a market-driven specialization of providers or choices between different usage scenarios can solve the problem, we analyze how negotiation techniques can lead to efficient contracts and how they can be integrated into current technologies. The analysis includes the identification of relevant and negotiable privacy dimensions for different usage domains. Negotiations in multi-channel retailing are examined as a detailed example. Based on a formalization of the user's privacy revelation problem, we model the negotiation process as a Bayesian game where the service provider faces different types of users. Finally an extension to P3P is proposed that allows a simple expression and implementation of negotiation processes. Support for this extension has been integrated in the Mozilla browser.

Austen Chamberlain and Britain's relationship with France, 1924-1929

Several historians have suggested that Austen Chamberlain's Francophile tendencies during his period as foreign secretary between 1924 and 1929 were the defining features of his European diplomatic strategy. By examining four key events: the rejection of the Geneva Protocol, the conclusion of the Treaty of Locarno, the Anglo-French Compromise on disarmament and the negotiation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, this article argues that Chamberlain's relationship with the French was not entirely harmonious. After the high point of Locarno, Britain's relations with France became increasingly tense because of Chamberlain's growing disillusionment with Briand's willingness to pursue a diplomatic agenda that did not have at its heart a reinvigorated Entente Cordiale

National Industrialization Strategies and Firm Level IR/HR Practices: Case Studies in Malaysia and Philippines

[Excerpt] Any economy is characterized by several different patterns of industrial relations (IR)and human resource (HR) practices at the level of the workplace. Often, the patterns of IR/HR practices of firms differ based on the nature of the industry, the nature of technology and production methods used, the specific economic circumstances facing firms, and in some cases the IR/HR philosophy of key individuals. Patterns of IR/HR practices also differ based on economic sectors, with IR/HR practices in the service sector showing differences with patterns in the manufacturing sector