Interlocking directorships and patenting coordination

Business Methods and Software Patenting

Naturally occurring items such as plants or minerals are, in general, ineligible for utility patent protection because they are viewed as belonging in the public domain. There is a dichotomy between those items that are naturally occurring, and consequently unpatentable, and those items that are not found in nature, which are patentable. Portions of items found in nature are eligible for patent...

Strategic Patenting and Software Innovation

Strategic patenting is widely believed to raise the costs of innovating, especially in industries characterised by cumulative innovation. This paper studies the effects of strategic patenting on R&D, patenting and market value in the computer software industry. We focus on two key aspects: patent portfolio size which affects bargaining power in patent disputes, and the fragmentation of patent r...

Patenting of Genetic Inventions

The genetic inventions in the patent system are similar to chemical inventions. Genetic inventions that are patentable include genetic materials such as DNA, RNA, cDNA, EST’s (Expressed Sequence Tags), SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphs) and recombinant vectors. These inventions need to satisfy the criteria of patentability such as novelty, nonobviousness, utility, enablement and sufficiency of...

Patenting the human genome.

Patenting computer-designed peptides.

The problem of designing new peptides that possess specific properties, such as bactericidal activity, is of wide interest. Recently, attention has focused on the use of Computer-Aided Molecular Design techniques in parallel with more traditional 'synthesise and test' methods. These techniques may typically use Genetic Algorithms to optimise molecules based on Neural Network models that predict...