Utility models and innovation in developing countries

노트 : UNCTAD-ICTSD Project on IPRs and Sustainable Developmen

DNA Music: Intellectual Property and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Patent regulation provides numerous examples of how policy decisions have consequences that run counter to what was intended. One reason that unintended consequences ensue arises from the fact that when powerful and organised business interests consider that a new reform inhibits their economic appropriation opportunities, they seek to make the perceived inadequacies of the law less harmful to their interests. They may achieve this through alternative legal means or by the adoption of new technologies. For certain reasons, regulating DNA patenting is especially vulnerable to unintended consequences. For businesses, one possible alternative to patents is to encode DNA sequences as music and use copyright and trade secrecy rather than patents. Of course, such alternative means of protection can have their own unintended consequences. If we are right in predicting that if molecular biology patenting is suppressed more and more, the legal and technological measures that lock up information will become increasingly attractive to industry, then one should tread very cautiously when reforming the patent system in this field. *Key words*: intellectual property, DNA patenting, biotechnolog

The Orphan Works Directive

This chapter analyses Directive 2012/28/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 on certain permitted uses of orphan works. This Directive is the result of a legislative process that addresses the legal situation where authors or rights holders of copyright protected works cannot be identified or located. It does this by establishing the conditions under which the orphan work status can be declared throughout the EU region, and under which such works can legitimately be reproduced and made available online. Without lengthy consideration of the actual risk and commercial consequences for a cultural heritage institution to be sued by an author who has found out that his work was considered to be an orphan, the EU accepted that 'soft-law' initiatives such as the 2006 Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural content and preservation were not sufficient to address the orphan works issue in an appropriate manner. Despite the Recommendation, only a few Member States have implemented orphan works legislation. Moreover, developments at the national level were circumscribed by the fact that they were not capable of addressing the issues posed by the online environment as they limited online access to citizens resident in their national territories. This was ignoring the cultural and educational potential offered by cross-border access of content

Harmonisation or differentiation in intellectual property protection? The lessons of history

Developing countries find themselves pressured to harmonise their intellectual property (IP) standards so that they match those of the United States, Europe and Japan. This article provides historical evidence to support the authors' claim that when developed countries demand that the rest of the world adopt their current IP regulations, developed countries are preventing other countries from adopting appropriate patent and copyright standards for their levels of development. Developed countries thereby deny a freedom to others that they themselves enjoyed when they were developing.intellectual property, patents, copyright, development, trade, history,