One of the most popular topics for legal analysis today is "Nanotechnology." One way that this topic is addressed is to apply historical experience and existing ideas to the development of this technology. However, many times this analysis flows from the assumption that nanotechnology is, from an Intellectual Property (IP) perspective, no different than other technologies, such as the developme...

The development and diffusion of antibiotics contributed to large improvements in human health and living standards. The antibiotic revolution also spawned the modern pharmaceutical industry. This paper reviews the development of the early antibiotics, and the roles of intellectual property rights (in particular, patents) in their development and diffusion. Though today the pharmaceutical secto...

We develop a quality ladder model to study the R&D incentive impacts of intellectual property rights with a “research exemption” or “experimental use” provision. The innovation process is sequential and cumulative and takes place alongside production in an infinite-horizon setting. We solve the model under two distinct intellectual property regimes, characterize the properties of the relevant M...

The commercialization of biotechnology has resulted in an intensive search for new biological resources for the purposes of increasing food productivity, medicinal applications, energy production, and various other applications. Although biotechnology has produced many benefits for humanity, its applications have also resulted in some undesirable consequences such as diminished species biodiver...

The authors address how patent protection in the United States is often quite narrow in scope, difficult to obtain, and insufficient in duration, thus stifling research and development of potential breakthrough pharmaceuticals. The authors further posit that countries that have enacted stronger intellectual property rights and research incentives have seen tremendous increases in foreign direct...

Article history: Received 1 October 2013 Received in revised form 1 October 2014 Accepted 5 November 2014 Available online 4 February 2015 This paper investigates the effects of software intellectual property rights (IPRs) on the performance of software firms. For this, technical efficiency scores for Korean software firms are examined, and for an empirical analysis, data envelopment analysis (...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has the noble goals of advancing traditional medicine and simultaneously promoting the regulation and professionalization of traditional healers. However, such regulation has the unintended consequence of withholding power from traditional practitioners. This review explores this concept through a historical analysis of traditional medicine in both India and ...

Rising prices of medicines are putting them beyond the reach of many people, even in rich countries. In less-developed countries, millions of individuals do not have access to essential drugs. Drug development is failing to address the major health needs of these countries. The prices of patented medicines usually far exceed the marginal costs of their production; the industry maintains that hi...

The commercialization of biotechnology has resulted in an intensive search for new biological resources for the purposes of increasing food productivity, medicinal applications, energy production, and various other applications. Although biotechnology has produced many benefits for humanity, its applications have also resulted in some undesirable consequences such as diminished species biodiver...