This excellent book, edited by two experts of Intellectual Property Rights, collects a number of interesting essays by economists, lawyers and practitioners on different points of view on the role of IPRs in promoting innovation and growth and on the proper objectives of patent protection with particular reference to the small and medium size enterprise, the TRIPS agreement and the European policy, interoperability and patents for computer implemented inventions and pharmaceutical and biotech IPRs.
IPRs are becoming one of the most influential and controversial issues in today’s knowledge-based society. The rapid and growing interest in IPRs reflects the political, economic, legal and moral challenges that characterise this field. At the macro level, IPRs affect a wide range of issues, such as international trade, enforcement, foreign direct investments, technology transfer, innovation climates, and competition and rules. At the micro level, IPRs are strongly embedded in contemporary business models. IPRs are becoming increasingly critical to the evaluation of intangible assets, the protection and managements of knowledge assets, and to the business strategies of knowledge-based industries and companies, both big and small (SMEs).
In Europe, IPRs policies and specific forms of IPRs are rapidly capturing the attention of policy makers and the public as a whole. They touch upon some fundamental issues, such as intra-EU harmonization, its innovation climate, antitrust and competition rules, and the EU’s ability to support specific sectors, such as the pharmaceutical sector, the biotechnology sector and the information technology sector. Moreover, IPRs are also strongly linked to the future ambitions of the EU region. In 2000, European Heads of State established the strategic goal for the EU of becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. Innovation was recognised as the key to the success of this strategy, which today is commonly referred to as the Lisbon Strategy or Agenda (depending upon how optimistically one chooses to treat it). However, six years later the EU has yet to produce the anticipated outcome. Different indicators suggest that the innovation gap between the EU and the US and Japan have not been narrowed and has possibly even increased, especially with regard to patenting activities. In this context it is worth noting the November 2004 report of the High Level Group which was asked to conclude about the progress of the Lisbon Strategy: ‘Companies will only invest in innovation and R & D if they have the certainty that they will be able to reap the rewards of that investment. An essential prerequisite for this is a legal framework for the protection of intellectual property rights that is accessible at low cost to Europe’s SMEs and academic institutions – something which is manifestly not the case at present.’ But, since the design and execution of different policies in the IPRs field is far from an easy task, and since the relative importance of IPRs is growing exponentially, there is an urgent need to discuss and debate the various issues and elements concerning the process of policy making, which is the purpose of this book.
The publication exposes readers to some of the central issues, as well as dilemmas, currently taking place in the IP field. This is done by way of providing contributed articles from eighteen distinguished scholars, policymakers and practitioners. In terms of structure, the publication is divided into four sections: 1) the role of IPRs in the business arena, 2) IPRs dilemmas, 3) global issues and 4) the European perspective.
