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This chapter provides an overview of the five main modes of intellectual property (IP) protection – patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and designs – available in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After describing the purposes of and principal differences among the five types of IP protection and outlining the advantages of each form, the chapter provides country- and region-specific information. The authors highlight the aspects of IP law in which international harmonization has, or has not yet, occurred, and offer insights into the relative advantages of various national and regional IP protection systems.

This chapter examines the role of “continuations” (procedural revisions of patent applications) within software patents and overall patenting in the United States during 1987–1999. Our research represents the first effort of which we are aware to analyse data on continuations in software or any other patent class, and as such provides information on the effects of 1995 changes in the U.S. patent law intended to curb “submarine patenting.” Our analysis of all U.S. patents issued 1987–1999 shows that the use of continuations grew steadily in overall U.S. patenting through 1995, with particularly rapid growth in continuations in software patenting. Sharp reversals in these growth rates after 1995 suggest that changes in the U.S. patent law were effective. Continuations were used more intensively by packaged-software firms prior to the effective date of the 1995 changes in patent law than by other patentees, and both software and non-software patents subject to continuation tend to be more valuable.

I begin with a dispute over a fox hunt, by which to understand the law of tangible property, then develop that metaphor for the major types of intellectual property. I start with domestic U.S. patent law for the sake of concreteness, and generalize to other jurisdictions and types of intellectual property. In the latter parts of the paper I discuss the international implications of intellectual property, including especially the effects of information spillovers. The last part of the paper describes the hazards in analogizing “trade” in intellectual property rights to trade in goods, and particularly in interpreting international patent data. These hazards motivate the search for a structural model specially adapted to the purpose of valuing international intellectual property rights and rules. The goal is to give economists a simple and integrated framework for analyzing intellectual property across time, jurisdiction and regime type, with an eye towards eventually developing other incentive systems that have the advantages of property (such as decentralized decision-making), but fewer of the disadvantages.

Globalization should provide firms with an opportunity to leverage their know-how and reputation across countries to create value. However, it remains challenging for them to actually capture that value using traditional Intellectual Property (IP) tools. In this paper, we document the strong growth in patents, trademarks, and industrial designs used by firms to protect their IP globally. We then show that IP protection remains fragmented; the quality of IP applications might be questionable; and developing a comprehensive IP footprint worldwide is very costly. Growing numbers of applications are causing backlogs and delays in numerous Patent and Trademarks Offices and litigation over IP rights is expensive, with an uncertain outcome. Moreover, local governments can succeed in transferring value to local firms and influencing global market positions by using IP laws and other regulations. In essence, the analysis shows a global IP environment that leaves much to be desired. Despite these challenges, there are successful strategies to capture value from know-how and reputation by leveraging an array of IP tools. These strategies have important implications for management practice, as we discuss in our concluding section. Global companies will need to organize cross-functional value capture teams focused on appropriating value from their know-how and reputation by combining different institutional, market, and nonmarket tools, depending on the institutional and business environment in a particular region.

This chapter provides an overview of five modes of intellectual property (IP) protection – patents, designs, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets – available in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. After describing the purposes of and principal differences among the five types of IP protection and outlining the advantages of each form, the chapter provides country- and region-specific information. The authors highlight the aspects of IP law in which international harmonization has, or has not yet, occurred, and offer insights into the relative advantages of various national and regional IP protection systems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate firm behaviors on patent examination request under the deferred patent examination system in Korea. The authors examine firm decisions on whether and when to request patent examinations when they face both uncertainty about invention’s value and market competition.

The authors provide a simple theoretical model and test a couple of hypothesis using Korea patent data. The authors employ KIPO (Korean intellectual patent office) patent applications data during 2006–2009 and incorporate it with firm financial data retrieved from1 Korea investor service-financial analysis system (KIS-FAS) database in Korea. The authors use the variation in the probability of lapsed patent applications filed in the same year and in the same technology field (at the four-digit IPC class level) of a patent application i as a proxy for the value of uncertainty, and further use one minus a firm’s market share (at the three-digit SIC industry level) as an indicator of the market competition faced by the firm/applicant.

The authors find that the examination requests of firms in Korea have interesting bipolar distribution, and both uncertainty about an invention’s value and market competition have significant impacts on firm’s decision for examination request. Applicants tend to utilize option value of waiting when uncertainty is high, but market competition attenuates the option value: the higher the competition, the less likely applicants are to delay or forego examination.

The authors’ study makes interesting contributions to the literature on the optimal design of the patent system in general and the deferred patent examination request system in particular. By considering the roles of both uncertainty and market competition in firm decisions, it provides a more comprehensive perspective on the deferred patent examination system. The study also provides empirical evidences on the broader research topic regarding firm decision for irreversible investment when faced with both uncertainty and competition, for which a strand of theoretical literature exists but empirical literature is largely limited. This study, which explicitly takes into account uncertainty and market competition, extends this line of empirical literature and fills the gap in the literature.

This study aims to find technologically important patent identification methods and indicators early and efficiently to grasp the technical qualitative level of patents, which are output indicators of research and development (R&D) results.

This paper reports on two methods for distinguishing important patents and the indicators obtained from those methods. One of the discrimination methods is Heckman's two-step estimation procedure. The second method is to find the centrality of each patent by network analysis of the citation relationship between publications and to find the importance from the magnitude of the centrality value.

In Heckman's analysis, the number of citations within three years after publication and the applicant's right acquisition/maintenance motivation index had positive effects on patent importance. The discriminative indicators of important patents by network analysis were degree centrality, mediation centrality, proximity centrality and transit values in the aggregated subnetworks. These two analytical methods are in a relationship that can complement each other's shortcomings. To efficiently evaluate the qualitative importance of patents, it is recommended to use these two methods together.

The indicators of important technical patents might change depending on the technical field. Future studies can apply this research to multiple technical fields to improve robustness and to construct an algorithm that can efficiently evaluate the quality of patents.

This study's results can be useful for grasping the patent position of the company or competitors numerically and for quantitatively evaluating the quality of R&D activities. Furthermore, it is possible to streamline the routine for an exploratory search of a huge number of patents. For example, it could be useful for detecting changes in the paradigm of specific technical knowledge, evolving the genealogy of technical knowledge and creating patent maps for new R&D. These methods greatly increase the effectiveness of technical knowledge information, which is the basis of R&D. In addition, the results of this study can help in evaluating patented assets.

This study confirmed the development process of technical knowledge. It is a fact that sharing, sympathy and mutual trust for technical issues and technical values are created among professional engineers and researchers inside and outside the organization, and their preferences and interactions develop and expand technical knowledge. Understanding the process of development and the evolution of this technical knowledge gives hints, such as expanding the discretionary power of engineers and researchers regarding corporate secrets, or reviewing the balance between control and independence, to solve Japanese management problems, which are often closed and monetized in R&D activities.

This study presents a scoring of the technical significance of patents by combining the two analytical methods. In addition, there are proposals as a method for detecting changes in the genealogy and paradigm of technical knowledge. As an analysis method, it is a new proposal that has never existed before.

In the intellectual property (IP) and management literature, the question of how external patent attorneys impact patent filings has been understudied. The purpose of this paper is to advance this area of research by examining how the use of external patent attorneys influences the patent filing strategies of firms and what impact firms’ level of experience with the exclusive use of in-house resources has on filing strategies. This study, thus, provides insights into the strategic dimension behind patent filing, a process which is affected by patent attorneys’ work and decision-making processes.

The econometric analysis is based on a patent database of 922,553 patents which is combined with an EPO patent database covering applications from 1990 to 2010. The authors test the hypotheses for this study using patent indicators addressing the impact of in-house firm experience vs the use of external patent attorneys on firm’s filing strategy.

This research finds empirical evidence that external patent attorneys’ work has an effect on patent scope, international scope, and patenting speed. Moreover, it can be shown that external patent attorneys have a positive impact on most filing dimensions, such as patent scope, international scope and the Patent Cooperation Treaty option, whereas the level of in-house firm experience has a negative impact on most filing dimensions. This implies that external patent attorneys seem to pursue a “maximization approach” while experienced firms seem to pursue a more differentiated approach to filing patents, for instance, drafting narrower and more focused patents.

The study suggests that effective filing strategies require an integrated approach between diverse IP stakeholders. More particularly, filing strategies should be communicated and aligned between all actors, including external patent attorneys in order to achieve the targeted patenting output.

The current study develops a patent filing typology, which accounts for patent attorneys’ decision options. In providing insights into patent attorneys’ work and their impacts on intellectual property rights management, the study is a useful complement to prior research, which has predominantly focused on applicants or examiners.

The authors argue that the patent term change introduced in Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in the USA inadvertently offered a metric of self-valuation of patents at the time of filing, affirming the ability of Drugs and Chemical patents to offer greater R&D incentives than other technology fields. As renewals also offer a metric of self-valuation, the authors find that upon renewal Computer patents are found to offer greater R&D incentives than Drugs and Chemicals. The purpose of this paper is to inquire as to why Computer patents are considered as more valuable in the post grant period, even though they were not considered as valuable upon filing. The authors advance the idea that patents can increase in value if encompassed in a patent portfolio.

The authors employ the introduction of the TRIPS agreement in the USA. In order to facilitate the move to TRIPS, the USPTO (unexpectedly) allowed applicants who filed prior to June 8, 1995 a patent length that was equal to the maximum of two regimes. Therefore, applicants that filed before the deadline were given a possible small extension of their patent’s time length. The authors use this change and renewal data to infer firms’ self-valuation of patents. For this reason, the authors acquire information for all utility patents that were filed around June 8, 1995 data project.

The authors offer an additional explanation that is related to the increasingly commonplace build up of patent portfolios: patents can increase in value if encompassed in a portfolio. Such portfolios are bundles of patents whose means to an end lays in their strength in numbers. As Lanjouw and Schankerman (2004) note, when a patent is added to a portfolio the cost of defending a technology against infringement allegations decreases. To rephrase, a patent is regarded as the additional foot-soldier who aids the firm, arm-in-arm, in defending its technological territory and in fulfilling its strategic goal.

The originality stemming from the paper is that policy makers that aim to tackle patent proliferation should not focus their attention to individual patents. Instead, they should target policies toward patent portfolios, because they provide the means of endowing patents with the extra weight that makes filing and renewing irrelevant patents worthwhile.