Search results

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.

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.

According to Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2015 Act, the registration of Child Care Institutions (CCIs) is compulsory, but the registration process all over the country is being prolonged on the part of the NGOs and other private welfare agencies. Against this background, the researcher intends to study the reasons for reluctance to registration by the CCIs.

The researcher adopted exploratory approach to find the reasons behind the reluctance towards JJ registration. There are 112 children’s homes in Malappuram district, among which 40 institutions did not apply or get JJ Registration. Among these 40, the researcher selected 20 (50%) by simple random sampling. The respondents were one among the institution’s Secretary/President or staff. The method used for extracting data was interview schedule and the collected data were coded and analyzed with the help of the SPSS software.

The CCIs apprehend that their organizational freedom would be limited after registration. Another observation of this study is most of the children’s homes are managed by religious organizations and most of them are worried that registering their institution under this act might adversely affect their religious sentiments. About 60% of the CCIs concern about the financial burden and 85% of them have difficulty to implement the new rules and regulation.

This study covered the 20 children’s Home and all those institutions are run by Muslim religious management, so the situations of child care institutions run by other management (Hindu, Christian, Secular) is not covered by this study.

We study ceremonial adoption of voluntary standards, where participants adopt the standard in principle but do not change their practices. Ceremonial adoption can benefit individual participants, who may be able to reap the benefits of association with the standard at lower cost, but it can be problematic for overall levels of adoption. We conceive of ceremonial adoption as an interaction between strategic incentives of participants and social ties to their audiences, such that not all participants are likely to ceremonially adopt. Our setting is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for sustainable construction. We study the conditions under which projects register for LEED certification, allowing them to claim affiliation with LEED, but then do not actually finish certification. While our data are correlational in nature, our results suggest that studying the competition for audience members (in our case, occupants) can provide greater understanding of certification behavior as well as overall levels of adoption. Our findings have implications for organizations that design and maintain voluntary standards and for organization theorists who wish to understand field-level change. Thus, we provide more evidence that strategy and organizational theory interact in important and often unexamined ways.

Universal helmet laws (UHLs) are widely believed to be effective in reducing motorcycle fatalities. In this chapter, we further investigate the effectiveness of such policies by focusing on their long-term impact as well as their effect on motorcycle use. Using state-level longitudinal data from 1975 to 2005, we estimate how the adoption and repeal of UHLs influence motorcycle safety. Our results confirm earlier findings that adoption of UHLs prevents fatalities, whereas repeals lead to higher fatality rates. We provide evidence that UHLs operate as intended, decreasing fatalities mainly by improving safety rather than by reducing motorcycle riding. Finally, using dynamic specifications, we show that the long-term effects of both adoption and repeal persist in the years beyond the policy change.

This chapter will portray the long and up-hill battle to abolish child marriage in India. It will focus on a few key moments of changing discourses on child marriage. While being categorized as a legitimate customary cultural practice over the centuries, there was a crucial generational shift towards addressing it as a violation of human rights within the past decade/s. For portraying these shifts, the metaphor of an up-hill battle has been chosen mainly for two reasons. On the one hand, it explicitly asks for investigating into the two parties (armies) involved in the violent “battle” over territory and/or ideas. On the other hand, it requests an understanding about the (metaphorical) landscape, with its slopes and pitfalls, reflecting the socio-cultural and political “landscape” where the battle is set.

At the global level, the United Nations has consistently advanced the agenda of addressing and safeguarding human rights, specifically for children. In India, successive governments have contributed to improving the protection of young girls, and boys, and tackling child marriage has been a crucial step to doing so. Thus, global conventions have been translated not only into national policies, but also into comprehensive legislation/s. Above all, the current Modi government strongly endeavours to (re-)brand India as a rapidly emerging digital global economy, rather than one characterized by violations of human rights, such as child marriage. Conceptually, the chapter will portray child marriage as a form of structural violence, where governance mechanisms fail to protect children from falling victim to human right abuses.

This chapter examines the role firm specific and institutional variables (such as regulation and trust) in firms’ decision to register their economic activities with authorities. Our empirical analysis is based on a large data set gathered from 40 African countries on more than 11,000 small, medium and large firms via the World Bank Enterprise Survey covering the period 2006–2014. This chapter is aimed at reinforcing the limited but a growing body of literature focussing on determinants of informal entrepreneurship using firm-level databases. The analysis of this study shows in institutional environments where there is trust in public institutions such as courts, firms are less likely to stay unregistered. Concerning firm specific variables young firms are found to be more likely to stay unregistered but there is a non-linear relationship between age and length of years spent unregistered. Firms with exporting strategy and in foreign ownership are less likely to stay longer unregistered. There are significant gains if policy-makers focus on building trust in institutions, fighting corruption, embarking on meaningful enforcement of rule of law principles, providing services without reliance on predatory tax policies, reducing firm transaction costs via improved licensing and technology-assisted registration systems.