The title question is answered in the affirmative. The patentability of natural gene sequences is based on general principles of patent law, and depends on novelty, inventive steps and industrial applicability of the subject matter to be patented. Patentability is further confirmed by the particular articles of the European Patent Convention and the recent EC Directive on the legal protection o...

security issues are the main concerns for players in international relations, for they put them on guard against potential relations that might cause threats. security feeling or lack of it determines the modality of cooperation and alliance among regional and trans-regional countries. the european :union: is vulnerable to threats and crises arising in the neighboring middle east. this state of...

the promotion of oil and gas industry of a country or region requires foreign and longterm investments. ensuring demand security constitutes one of the major driving forces for promoting investments in oil and gas sectors. our main question is to understand the upcoming energy demand security in the caspian markets. just like supply security, energy demand security cannot be affected mainly by ...

Over the last years several European patents were opposed for protecting technology violating the morality requirement under Article 53(a) EPC. Attempts have been made by the Appeal Boards of the European Patent Office (EPO), as well as by amendments introduced into the Implementing Regulations of the European Patent Convention (EPC), to address this sensitive patentability requirement more pre...

What drives processes of institution building within regional international organizations? We challenge those established theories of regionalism, and of institutionalized cooperation more broadly, that treat different organizations as independent phenomena whose evolution is conditioned primarily by internal causal factors. Developing the basic premise of 'diffusion theory' - meaning that deci...

How did post-socialist transition and a parallel shift in international labor division restructure regional innovation systems in Central and Eastern Europe? This question is increasingly important, because current EU innovation policy is combined with regional development in Smart Specialization Strategies; however, spatial trends of innovation in Central and Eastern Europe are not fully under...

Abstract: This paper explores the main patterns of firms' technological diversification and the main factors affecting the extent and direction of technological diversification. The basic point of this paper is that a major drive for technological diversification is knowledge. Two dimensions of knowledge are examined here: cumulativeness and proximity. The first dimension -cumulativenessrefers ...

This paper analyses market valuations of UK companies using a new data set of their R&D and IP activities (1989-1999). In contrast to previous studies, the analysis is conducted at the sectoral level, where the sectors are based on the technological classification in Pavitt (1984). The first main result is that the valuation of R&D and IP varies substantially across these sectors. To explore th...