Posts in International

Alibaba is a highly valuable organization doing business in a market that could be described as a combination of the markets addressed by eBay, Amazon, PayPal, and Google. Alibaba.com started as a business-to-business portal to connect Chinese manufacturers with buyers all over the world. In September 2014, the conglomerate of web portals became the world’s largest IPO, valued at over US$230 billion.

Fundamentally, patents facilitate access to VC financing, market entry and job creation. Without patents and an effective IP environment, the process stalls and, in some cases, firms may never emerge. Without adequate IP protection, innovators are unable to attract investments, business creation is slowed and jobs lost. Evidence suggests that this same story plays out, albeit with differing dynamics, across all sorts of firms and all nations. Economic prosperity relies on job growth, and it is clear that strong, effective IP rights have a role to play in creating both.

These rules of the game for operating within the Chinese market are especially troubling given the lack of respect paid to American patent rights by Chinese firms. Foreign companies operating in China are forced to operate as 50-50 joint ventures with domestic companies and technology transfer has been a part of the price of entering the Chinese market going back to the early 1980s. Nominally, this practice runs afoul of tech transfer regulations that the Chinese government must respect as a member of the World Trade Organization, which it joined in 2001. However, as the economic policy paper points out, the regulations are difficult to enforce, private firms are dissuaded from speaking out publicly about negotiations while entering the Chinese market and the Chinese government stands to gain by letting the system continue as it has.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation addressed whether unmanned aerial systems (UAS), also known as drones, could be further incorporated into American airspace for commercial purposes. Drones have enjoyed a growing profile in our collective consciousness thanks in large part to both the incredible array of applications for this technology as well as the concerns over public safety and privacy. Drones can take much of the danger out of work such as utility line inspection or search and rescue missions but their ability to capture images with high-definition cameras has led many to worry about a growth in unwanted snooping by drones.

Unfortunately, the high cost of pharmaceutical medications is why about 50 million adults between the ages of 19 and 64 do not fill out a prescription every year. Medications purchased over the Internet can cost up to 90 percent less than the same medication purchased in a brick-and-mortar pharmacy. It is also easy to understand those cost savings given the ingredients found in online pharmaceuticals. Consumers obviously need better protections to make sure that the medication they’re purchasing is the medication are ordering and not drywall or rat poison.

Claiming to be the ”Pharmacy to the Developing World”, India argues that their lax intellectual property rights regime is critical to their ability to provide low-cost, quality generic drugs. They are wrong on two counts. First, India needs to honor IP rights, because without effective intellectual property rights, new pharmaceuticals will not be developed and the “Pharmacy to the Developing World” won’t have anything to provide to the developing world, or to anyone. Second, given the quality crisis in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, they shouldn’t be the pharmacy to anyone.

The very tiniest particles that make up all of the matter that we can’t see are being discovered by the largest single machine ever created on planet Earth. With experiments having begun again at the Large Hadron Collider operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, teams of thousands of scientists are hopeful that discoveries of dark matter and antimatter may yield up important answers, perhaps in the next few months to such fundamental questions as “Why are we here?”

The USPTO will soon publish the Final Rules governing processing and examination of international design applications filed pursuant to the Hague Agreement. The Agreement and the USPTO’s Final Rules are all expected to go into effect on May 13, 2015. U.S. design patents resulting from applications filed on or after May 13, 2015 will have a 15 year term.

With the Euro once again in crisis people look back on the decision to go with the common currency and many people here believe that that was a step too far. That engaging in the expectation that if we do this it will naturally bring us closer together was perhaps way too optimistic. And too risky. And that risking the kind of fiscal instability that we have seen recently in order to push everyone towards a closer political union some people are saying now was a very bad bet to make, without a real supra-national bank and without having first knitted the countries together better politically.

An interview with Jim Pooley, former Deputy Director General of WIPO – The actual changes that we might have to accept in a truly globalized, harmonized system are not going to be that difficult for us. The real difficulty is getting everybody to agree on one set of best practices. That, it turns out, is a political road that is just as difficult now as it ever has been. But the goal is clear, the goal is compelling and I think all of us need to work as hard as we can to push things in that direction. First of all we’ve got to get the industrialized countries to agree on a single approach, or at least an understood and aligned approach, to a grace period. Once that happens I think the other issues that we have to deal with will fall into place. We have to keep in mind that while the politicians or diplomats argue with one another, we have sitting on the sidelines all of our clients who are cheering for harmonization. They want to see this happen. And at the end of the day politicians need to recognize it’s the users of the patent system that own it and we need to make sure that they get the system that they deserve.

The challenges to the global IP system, however, go much, much deeper than mere debates over so-called patent trolls or patent quality. The very premises of our intellectual property laws — the economic value of the intellectual property system itself — are now in deep dispute, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. Indeed, global anti-IP sentiment seems to be at its highest level since the late 1860s, when opponents of intellectual property rights succeeded — for a time, at least — in abolishing or weakening the patent systems of several nations around the world.