Patent trolls—firms that appropriate profits from innovation by enforcing patents against infringers—are peculiar players on markets for technologies. As buyers of patents, they are solely interested in the exclusion right, not in the underlying knowledge. Similarly, when they sell or license out patents, the transaction does not involve a technology transfer. In this paper, we empirically anal...

By identifying the features of patent applications filed by 22 countries at the Chinese Patent Office from 1996 to 2003, this study finds that the main factors accounting for the recent patent boom in China can be attributed to the second revision of the Chinese patent law in 2000, the intensification of R&D expenditure both in China and the rest of the world, and the increasing foreign direct ...

As business has become global, so have disputes about patents, patent infringement, and patent validity. In many ongoing disputes between patent holders and alleged infringers, parties are engaging in parallel court proceedings in multiple countries to litigate infringements of parallel patents and to contest the validity of patents. Concentrating litigation involving identical inventions and i...

In the title compound, C(7)H(11)N(2)O(2)S(+)·Cl(-), the 4,6-dimeth-oxy-2-(methyl-sulfan-yl)pyrimidinium cation is essentially planar (r.m.s. deviation = 0.043 Å). In the crystal, the anions and cations are connected by inter-molecular N-H⋯Cl and C-H⋯Cl hydrogen bonds, forming a two-dimensional network parallel to (011). Adjacent networks are cross-linked via π-π inter-actions involving the pyri...

We investigate the effects of changes in the blue straggler formation rate in globular clusters on the blue straggler distribution in the color-magnitude diagram. We find that the blue straggler distribution is highly sensitive to the past formation rate. Comparing our models to new UBV observations of a region close to the core of 47 Tucanae suggests that this cluster may have stopped forming ...

Smectic blue phases ( BP(Sm)) are thermotropic liquid crystalline phases which exhibit both three-dimensional orientational order, such as classical blue phases, and smectic positional order. BP(Sm) appear as the three-dimensional counterpart of twist grain boundary phases. X-ray scattering and optical polarizing microscopy provide information on the hexagonal and cubic symmetries of these new ...