Patents A patent is the legal right of an inventor to exclude others from making or using a particular invention. This right is sometimes termed an 'intellectual property right' and is viewed as an encouragement for innovation. This article gives a brief history of patenting, and discusses the legal and administrative process for obtaining a patent in the major world jurisdictions. Evidence on ...

Lactobacillus casei LC2W, a patented probiotic strain (Z. Wu, European patent EP 1642963 B1, February 2009), has been isolated from Chinese traditional dairy products and implemented in industrial production as starter culture. Here we present the complete genome sequence of LC2W and the identification of a gene cluster implicated in the biosynthesis of exopolysaccharides.

Economic research based on surveys, interviews, and case studies indicates that the linkage between science and industry is significant and growing in importance over time. Statistical analysis of patent-to-paper citations also strongly supports the notion of a growing science-technology linkage. However, this approach seems to suggest that the linkage is highly concentrated in the biotechnolog...

in the past and before granting the inventors and owners of intellectual property rights special exclusive rights and privileges under the patent laws, the protection of intellectual property rights was possible only through a legal regime which could help to keep the know how and innovation secret. this regime, in which contractual terms are often used to keep the innovation secret, is called ...

Biological technology allows us to invent new medical approaches, create effective food production methods and reserves and develop new materials for industrial production. There is a diversity of biological technology types, and different technologies have different priorities for invention. This study examines the factors that are important for the invention of biology-related technologies in...

The purification of heparin from offal is an old industrial process for which commercial recipes date back to 1922. Although chemical, chemoenzymatic, and biotechnological alternatives for this production method have been published in the academic literature, animal-tissue is still the sole source for commercial heparin production in industry. Heparin purification methods are closely guarded in...

Technology transactions, such as licensing and R&D based alliances, have been growing rapidly in recent years. Even as technology licensing has grown, so has patenting. Both trends foreshadow possibly profound changes in firms’ strategy. In this paper, we develop a simple structural model in which both patenting and licensing are jointly determined by factors such as patent effectiveness, the p...

This paper investigates patterns of industrial dynamics and competition in the pharmaceutical industry, with particular reference to the consequences of patent expiry in different countries. We focus on the competition at the level of single chemical entities, distinguishing between original brands and generic products. Quarterly data, spanning from July 1987 to December 1998, on sales of pharm...

nowadays, business methods are among the most important assets of a company, protectable as an intellectual property right. different legal systems have, always, taken different approaches in this regard. although trade secrets are the most traditional form to protect business methods, the companies' willingness to patent inventions in this field has so increased that the significance and ...