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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.

In 1998 and 1999, the Office of Student Financial Assistance of the Department of Education and the Patent and Trademark Office of the Department of Commerce, were designated as Performance-Based Organizations (PBOs), respectively. This paper examines the transformation progress of the agencies, as they attempt to convert to high-performing organizations by utilizing and establishing new and more flexible systems of performance-oriented business practices and processes.

The paper compares and contrasts the different approaches and tools used to improve management and organizational performance, as well as concentrate on human resources, procurement, budget, customer service, and internal controls. The document explores whether or not these agencies have improved their performance as a result of these flexibilities and examines the organizational and cultural challenges encountered as the agencies move from a restrictive and bureaucratic system, to a more liberal system of management and internal controls.

The Performance-Based Organizations (PBOs) concept is to have federal agencies focus on the customer, deliver high quality products, and devise more efficient operations. Therefore, the paper further examines whether or not the PBO legislation has been effective in changing the performance of federal organizations by granting administrative and managerial flexibilities aligned with corporate (agency) strategies, performance, and pay.

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 authors' goal in writing this article was to provide background information and detailed considerations to assist those wishing to provide patent and trademark assistance at their libraries. The major considerations include staffing, spaces and resources, with the time commitment from the staff being the most significant.

This paper combined the experiences of an author relatively new to patent and trademark librarianship with one who has years of experience. These were used in tandem with knowledge gained from a decade of attendance at annual week-long seminars at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) as well as by way of a comprehensive literature review.

The main commitment needed in providing patent and trademark services to the public is not money but the investment of time, which includes professional development, staffing, teaching classes and workshops, outreach and consultations.

The information in this paper should serve as guidance to anyone new to providing patent and trademark services within their libraries, including those at Patent and Trademark Resource Centers (PTRCs), Patent Information Centres (PATLIBs) and beyond. Although articles have been published on various aspects of intellectual property (IP) and libraries, a comprehensive guide to providing patent and trademark services has yet to be published.

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.

From its first patent statute, the United States awarded patents to the first person to invent. The rest of the world eventually adopted “first to file” regimes, in which the first person to file a patent application was awarded the patent. In 2013, the United States moved closer to harmonizing with the rest of the world. The America Invents Act created a “first inventor to file” system, representing the most dramatic change in US patent law in over fifty years. This chapter explores the new provisions by offering a basic operation of how they operate. It then discusses the myriad of new administrative procedures at the United States Patent and Trademark Office that were created in the America Invents Act. These procedures have the potential to challenge patents more cheaply than in litigation. The chapter discusses the various requirements and limitations of these provisions.

Artificial intelligence-related inventions raise complex questions of how to define the boundaries around patentable subject matter. In the United States, many claim that the recent doctrinal developments by the Supreme Court have led to incoherence and excessive uncertainty within the innovation community. In response, policymakers and stakeholders have suggested legislative amendments to address these concerns. We first review these developments, and subsequently use the patent examination record to empirically test the claims of increased uncertainty. We find that, although uncertainty did spike following the Supreme Court's holding in Alice, it quickly returned to levels comparable to its historic norm. This has implications both for those advocating for legislative changes to the law of eligible subject matter, as well as other jurisdictions considering adopting a test similar to that applied in Alice.

The goal of this study was to investigate the co-citation of information security patents in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database.

This research is a scientometrics study that has been conducted using the co-citation analysis. The statistical population of the present study includes all patents of information security filed in the USPTO database from 1971 to 2015. As a result of this search, 30,736 patents were retrieved. In this investigation, UCINET software and its complementary package (NetDraw) were employed to plot scientific maps.

The findings of this study indicated an upward trend of patents in the field of information security between 1971 and 2015. The “California State” has the top world rank in information security inventions, followed by “Japan” and the “Washington State.” “VAN WIE, DAVID M” is the most cited inventor in the field of information security. The analysis of inventors' co-citation data indicated that “ADAMS, NEIL- LITTLE” and “HERBERT ANTHONY” had the highest co-citation rates with each other and were ranked first. The survey of high-citation inventors based on centrality indices indicated that “LEACH, PAUL J” graded first in degree centrality, “BENALOH, JOSH D” in betweenness centrality and “BENALOH, JOSH D” in closeness centrality.

The co-citation analysis of patents can show the most important patents and the relationships between them. Such analyses can be useful for large-scale policymaking or identification of existing gaps and attempting to address them.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has the potential to transform the organisation of all the activities carried out by firms. The growing diffusion of these technologies is increasingly challenging multinational enterprises to reinvent their businesses. Accordingly, many scholars argue that AM may reduce countries’ participation in global value chains (GVCs) or, at least, affect GVCs’ geography, length and further developments. However, so far, the lack of available data on the real worldwide diffusion of these technologies has precluded the possibility to study this phenomenon from an empirical standpoint.

This study investigates AM technologies, with a particular focus on their possible impact on GVCs, in the framework of the current debate in international business. In order to examine this relationship and overcome the lack of adoption data, the authors identify a potential proxy of AM diffusion – that is, patenting activity. Coherently, the authors employ this proxy and a country-level measure of GVC participation (i.e., the Share of Re-Exported Inputs on Total Imported Inputs) to empirically investigate the role of AM in influencing countries’ participation to GVCs. This country-level analysis is focussed on three specific industries and the aggregate economy in 58 countries for the period 2000–2014.

The results show that AM decreases a country’s participation in GVCs, both at the country level and, in particular, in the sectors which are more likely to be affected by AM technologies. This evidence suggests that this phenomenon might be induced by a decreasing reliance on intermediates processed abroad, hence an increasing importance of domestic goods, manufactured via AM.