Harmonization Without Consensus: Critical Reflections on Drafting a Substantive Patent Law Treaty

In this Article, we contend that the World Intellectual Property Organization\u27s proposed Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) is premature. Developing countries are struggling to adjust to the heightened standards of intellectual property protection required by the TRIPS Agreement of 1994. With TRIPS, at least, these countries obtained side payments (in the form of trade concessions) to offset the rising costs of knowledge products. A free-standing instrument, such as the SPLT, would shrink the remaining flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement with no side payments and no concessions to the catch-up strategies of developing countries at different stages of technological advancement. More controversially, we argue that a deep harmonization would boomerang against even its developed country promoters by creating more problems than it would solve. There is no vision of a properly functioning patent system for the developed world that commands even the appearance of a consensus. The evidence shows, instead, that the worldwide intellectual property system has entered a brave new scientific epoch, in which experts have only tentative, divergent ideas about how best to treat a daunting array of new technologies. The proposals for reconciling the needs of different sectors, such as information technology and biotechnology, pose hard, unresolved issues at a time when the costs of litigation are rising at the expense of profits from innovation. These difficulties are compounded by the tendency of universities to push patenting up stream, generating new rights to core methodologies and research tools. As new approaches to new technologies emerge in different jurisdictions, there is a need to gather empirical evidence to determine which, if any, of these still experimental solutions are preferable over time. Our argument need not foreclose other less intrusive options and measures surveyed in the Article that can reduce the costs of delaying harmonization. However, the international community should not rush to freeze legal obligations regarding the protection of intellectual property. It should wait until economists and policymakers better understand the dynamics of innovation and the role that patent rights play in promoting progress and until there are mechanisms in place to keep international obligations responsive to developments in science, technology, and the organization of the creative community

Coherent Laser Radar for Vibrometry : Robust Design and Adaptive Signal Processing

A coherent laser radar system based on semiconductor laser technology has been designed and built. The compact design and the absence of adjustments makes the system mechanically robust and easy to use. The present system has an output power of 50 mW and a line width of 280 kHz (HWHM). The laser radar system has been used in vibrometry measurements. For vibrometry of moving objects, adaptive signal processing is required in order to obtain the vibration signature. Especially for unresolved objects, interference between different vibrating parts will complicate the analysis. Modelbased estimation techniques are used to obtain the parameters which determine the dynamics of the reflecting object

Coherent laser radar for vibrometry: Robust design and adaptive signal processing

A coherent laser radar system based on semiconductor laser technology has been designed and built. The compact design and the absence of adjustments makes the system mechanically robust and easy to use. The present system has an output power of 50 mW and a line width of 280 kHz (HWHM). The laser radar system has been used in vibrometry measurements. For vibrometry of moving objects, adaptive signal processing is required in order to obtain the vibration signature. Especially for unresolved objects, interference between different vibrating parts will complicate the analysis. Modelbased estimation techniques are used to obtain the parameters which determine the dynamics of the reflecting object. Key words: coherent laser radar, vibrometry, modelbased signal processing 2 INTRODUCTION Coherent laser radar (CLR) systems have been investigated over several decades primarily for military applications. In order to receive a more general industrial acceptance, compact, robust, cost-effective ..

Coronary Artery Diameter Variations due to Pulse Flow Propagation

Information about local diameter variations as a response to the pulse flow in the human coronary arteries may indicate the development of artherosclerosis before this can be seen as a stenosis on coronary angiograms. This paper describes the design of an image processing tool to measure this diameter variation from a sequence of digital coronary angiograms. If a blood vessel reponds less elastically to the pulse flow, this may be an indication of artherosclerosis in an early stage. We have developed an image analysis and processing algorithm which is able after vessel segment selection by the user, to calculate automatically the vessel diameter variations from a standard sequence of digital angiograms. Several problems are treated. The periodic motion of the vessel segment in the consecutive frames is taken into account by tracking the vessel segment using a 2-dimensional logarithmic search to find the minimum in the mean absolute distance. A robust artery tracing algorithm has been i..

On the Assessment of Image Compression Quality By Means of Quantitative Coronary Angiography

Many techniques for image compression do exist and are well described in the literature. Lossless image compression is for digital coronary angiograms limited to compression ratios in the order of 3--4. The purpose of this work is about the assessment of the diagnostic image quality of lossy compressed coronary angiograms by means of Quantitative Coronary Angiography (QCA). We measure in the compressed images the diameter of the vessel at several places as a function of the compression ratio and compare this with the original image. The set of representative images (512 by 512 pixels at 8 bits/pixel) is compressed with the ratios 4, 8, 12 and 16. The selected compression algorithms are JPEG, Lapped Orthogonal Transform (LOT) and Modified Fast Lapped Transform (MFLT). The obtained quantitative diameter values start to deviate at images representations down at 0.5 bit per pixel with the JPEG giving the greatest differences (typ. ? 5%). The results of LOT and MFLT are performing better wi..