Patents and intellectual property rights Flashcards
What is a patent?
Patents are legal instruments intended to encourage innovation by providing a limited monopoly to the inventor (or their assignee) in return for the disclosure of the invention.[1][2] The underlying assumption is that innovation is encouraged because an inventor can secure exclusive rights and, therefore, a higher probability of financial rewards for their product in the marketplace or the opportunity to profit from licensing the rights to others. The publication of the invention is mandatory to get a patent.
Why it is an argument for why patents discourage innovation?
Patents discourage innovation. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started developing the first Apple computers in a garage, they did not worry much about patents. They shared and borrowed ideas from their network of fellow geeks. If they had had to pay royalties on all the software they borrowed, today we would have no email, no smartphones, no What’s App, no Google. The most important software innovations in the US happened before the US began allowing software patenting (in Europe, software patents as such are not possible.) More recently, the pace of innovation slowed.
What are some examples of patents being used?
Today, patents are often used as weapons. In the 1950s, an American inventor filed so-called “submarine patents” to claim an early form of machine vision technology; when others decades later developed bar code and other machine readers he sued to protect his previously unnoticed patents and collected more than $1 billion – even though the real development work had been done by others.
What is the role of patents in pharmaceutical industry?
A pharmaceutical company may want to obtain secondary patents, which protect such aspects of a drug as, for example, its process of manufacture, formulation and/or specific form, etc. Therefore, even after the basic patent protecting an active compound expires, a drug may still be protected by other secondary patents.
Do pharmaceutical companies have the right to patent plants?
For example, products of nature cannot be patented, but transgenic plants and animals and microorganisms that are the product of human invention may be patented.
Why are drugs patented?
Obtaining patent protection is important to safeguard the innovative approaches used by pharma companies. Drug patents help recoup investments that are incurred during the research and development stage. Drug patents can secure against infringement cases, as competitors can easily duplicate the manufacturing of a drug.
What happens when a drug is patented?
The drug is covered under patent protection, which means that only the pharmaceutical company that holds the patent is allowed to manufacture, market the drug and eventually make profit from it.
Could society be more innovative without patents?
One study of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the world’s first technology fair in London, found that only 10 per cent of the innovations on display had been patented. More recently, a Carnegie Mellon survey of companies in the mid-1990s found fewer than half of innovations had been patented. Another survey of European companies found just 25 percent of process innovations and 36 per cent of product innovations were patented. Most innovations were protected using the advantages of a “first mover” or trade secrets.
What are some examples of the positives of patents?
One case in point is Michelin’s invention of the rubber automobile tyre. The company prospered on its patents, of course; but the value to society has been far greater than Michelin’s own revenues, as an entire tyre industry developed around the invention and that in turn helped advance the automotive sector. None of that would have happened had Michelin not had a secure way to recover the costs of its R&D and market development work over many years. An oft-suggested alternative to private-sector patents is government R&D support; but governments are poor at picking market winners.
What is R&D?
Research and development, also known as R&D, is the process by which a company works to generate new knowledge that it might use to create new technology, products, services, or systems that it will either use or sell.
the United States is
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stagnating it is in large part because
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patents are monopolizing knowledge now
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what does that mean well since the
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beginning of the century large companies
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have systematically patented their
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technological developments making it
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impossible for small companies to
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imitate or Implement their technology as
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a result small companies are falling
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behind and large companies have less and less competition so they in turn innovate less and less
While in the early 1980s the top one percent of companies held about 38 of patents in 2010 that figure soared to 55 percent
