As a follow-up to the May/June Micro Law column on abuse of the standard-setting process, I now turn to Rambus’ version of the previously summarized Secret Squirrel saga. A jury in Richmond, Virginia, found that with the aid of a secret informant (designated Secret Squirrel) inside the Joint Electronic Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC) standard-setting group, Rambus engaged in industrialgrade...

This paper examines firms’ uses of secrecy and patenting in order to explore three elementary questions of firm intellectual property strategy: First, are there complementarities between patenting and secrecy that firms exploit when crafting their technology market strategies? Second, what drives the firm’s choice of a patent-secret mix when developing a strategy to sustain to itself competitiv...

This paper investigates to what extent fair trade programmes, are indeed ‘fair’. This is accomplished by comparing fair trade with free trade and protectionist trade regimes on their compliance of the criteria set by the fair trade movement itself. This comparison is made using comparative cost based and economies of scale models. It is found that whether or not fair trade is superior to free t...

This paper analyzes innovation trends in Latin America countries by means of the number of patent applications filed by residents and non residents during the period 1965 to 2012. Making use of patent data released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), we search for the presence of multiple structural changes in patent application series in Argentina, Brazil Chile, and Mexico....

This Article presents an original empirical methodology to identify which patent laws will best promote optimal incentives to innovate for society. Vociferous debates over patent reform pit the United States’ largest innovation industries against each other in a dispute concerning whether stronger or weaker patent rights are necessary to promote innovation. Past efforts to answer this question ...

We study the effects of reforms in the legal scope of patent rights (PRs) on the international pattern of sectoral exports, before and after implementation of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement at the World Trade Organization (WTO), in a generalized factor-proportions framework. We find that, conditional on factor endowments and intensities, a country wi...

This Article will use recently decided intellectual property cases and other recent developments in European Community competition law to critically discuss the European Community’s traditional and strict pro-free trade approach in intellectual property cases. It will focus in particular on issues relating to the territorial nature of intellectual property rights. Part I of this Article examine...