1,721,255 research outputs found
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Empirical Study of Patent Infringement and Validity Cases in China
No full textAfter the Chinese government enacted new policies to stimulate domestic innovation and patent activities, China has become a world leader in both patent applications and patent litigation. These major developments, together with the escalated U.S.-China trade tensions, have made China an integral but controversial venue of international patent protection. However, due to the lack of judicial transparency in China prior to 2014, there had been virtually no access to case data. Before 2014, all public knowledge about Chinese patent cases was obtained from either interpreting the plain text of Chinese law and regulations or analyzing a limited number of published cases that the Supreme People’s Court considered having significant social impact.Patent cases in China are in need of a comprehensive empirical study. Taking advantage of the 2014 judicial reform and the public release of court documents in China, this article fills this gap by analyzing all publicly available patent infringement lawsuits and post-grant invalidity cases decided between 2014 and 2016 in China. Surprisingly, part of its findings disprove some long-standing beliefs about the Chinese patent system. One prominent example is that foreign parties fared much better than their Chinese counterparts. In infringement cases, foreign patentees were more likely to win than Chinese patent owners and received much higher damages. Moreover, foreign requesters succeeded more often in post-grant invalidation process than Chinese requesters. This Article also collects statistics on a number of other characteristics of patent cases in China. It provides comprehensive data on several different aspects of the Chinese patent system. Some of the key findings include that the overwhelming majority of patent infringement lawsuits in China involved mechanical patents instead of electrical and chemical patents; that on average, patent owners had waited quite a long time before enforcement; that at most, only about 0.6% of all issued patents are ever subject to invalidity challenges; etc. In addition to providing descriptive statistics, this article also conducts hypothesis testing, in an effort to identify potential predictors of the outcomes of patent cases in China. It finds that most variables tested in this article revealed significant predictive value. However, there are several exceptions. For infringement lawsuits, only one factor, economic regions, demonstrated no relationship with the amount of damages granted. Two factors, including plaintiffs’ residency and appeals, were not predictors of injunctions. For invalidity cases, prosecution length was not related to a patent’s validity
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Evaluating New Copyright Reforms in the Mandarin Music Market: Assessing How Collective Management and the Licensing Systems Afford Economic Incentives for Artists
Full text linkChina’s music copyright collecting society (the Music Copyright Society of China (MCSC)) and its new music platforms (e.g. Tencent, NetEase, Alibaba’s Xiami Music, Baidu Music and QQ Music), find points of commonality through constructing more efficient and profitable systems, so as to generate more users and greater income. These new perspectives can provide artists in the Mandarin music market with a more flexible and profitable pathway to construct their licensing infrastructure. It can also be observed how technology facilitates this breakthrough. In the relevant scholarly literature, articles on music licensing have mostly focused on music licensing issues within a single jurisdiction, or new approaches to music licensing issues discovered by concentrating on international norms.This research advocates the notion that the new licensing models and regulations in the U.S. and Europe deserve closer examination. By undertaking a comparison of the various copyright regulations, cases and statistics, this research aims to contribute to academic science by extracting frameworks and solutions from the U.S. and European licensing models, and examining them in context of the Mandarin music market
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A Proposal to Revise the Alice Test for Software Patents
Full text linkABSTRACTMost human innovations begin from an abstraction, a judicial exception that by itself is not patent-eligible. Abstract ideas are considered basic tools of scientific and technological work, which courts prefer not to award with a monopoly because exclusive ownership of these essential elements would only serve to hinder economic and innovative progress. The problem concerning patent eligibility under §101 is that we do not have any measurement or indicator to differentiate when a claim consists of only an abstract idea and when a claim does not. Currently, courts rely on precedent that is ambiguous rather than relying on more concrete measures based on the specific type of underlying software. Lacking this measurement, coupled with inherent software complexity, has resulted in inconsistent jurisprudence that is often inscrutable. These inconsistencies in the jurisprudence of cases involving computer programs stem from lacking a proper framework based on the functional nature of computer programs. There are several different proposals with inconsistent explanations as to how to apply the judicially created framework in determining patent eligibility. Still, none of them suggest a practical test specifically for software fields based on the functional nature of computer software to solve the patent eligibility problem. Additionally, proper disclosures are needed to combat high invalidity rates due to the lack of quality of patent applications.This study addressed the confusion regarding the existing judicial framework (Alice’s framework) in determining patent eligibility (§101) of software inventions. It proposed a new framework for determining patent eligibility in which the meaning of an abstract idea is defined in a practical way, as routine building blocks, based on the functional characteristics of software programs. These routine building blocks are not patent-eligible because the only embodiment is its fundamental components that are common in all inventions in that type of software. Granting any patent to claims of these essential elements will preempt other’s innovative progress in that specific type of software. The functionality of this framework was tested on some software patent cases dealing with the §101 issue, as well as on one actual AI (Artificial Intelligence) pending patent application. Additionally, this study suggested proper disclosures through examples to improve the quality of patent applications by specifying some factors that might affect the validity of a software patent regarding the sufficiency of its disclosure. Giving robust indicators to the patent examiners, judges, jurists, patentees, and practitioners to increase the certainty of predicting the outcome of the case based on the content quality of the underlying claims is the main contribution of this study. The result is significant because, with this legal paradigm, the unavoidably subjective assessments of computer programs in determining patent eligibility are formalized.Keywords: Intellectual Property, Software Patent, Abstract Idea, Alice Test, Patent Eligibility Test, Sufficient Disclosure, Artificial Intelligence, Building Blocks, Section 101, Section 112, U.S. Patent Act
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Mapping an Amazon Expedition: A Study of Platform-Administered Patent Infringement Adjudication
Full text linkThis dissertation is the first extensive research into Amazon Patent Evaluation Express (APEX), a system Amazon created to adjudicate patent infringement disputes between patent owners and the platform’s third-party sellers. I uncover APEX’s rules, showing that it is distinct from platforms’ existing copyright and trademark enforcement mechanisms. I also explore Amazon’s motives in creating such a system, discussing legal and non-legal incentive considerations surrounding the general problem of patent infringement complaints. This dissertation then surveys federal court cases involving motions to enjoin APEX, illustrating how parties are challenging Amazon’s private adjudication as a practice. I conclude that fundamentally, policy discussion about APEX’s problems and how to fix it remains the more direct way of improving the system. This dissertation places APEX within the context of platforms increasingly acting as “lawmakers” and “courts” in our society, calling attention to a novel development in both patent law and dispute resolution
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Locke for the Masses: Property Rights and the Products of Collective Creativity
Full text linkIn this brief Idea piece, I describe how the labor theory of property rights associated with John Locke might apply to projects such as WikiPedia, which aggregate many small contributions by dispersed contributors. These works of collaborative creativity represent very significant investments of time and resources, yet do not fit comfortably within the individually-oriented framework of traditional Lockean analysis. Locke\u27s central insight - that laboring on unowned resources ought (with exceptions and qualifications) to justify appropriation - suggests the desirability of granting some form of property interest over the products of collaborative creativity. I also explore a few practical issues that would have to be resolved to implement such a right
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
A New Dynamism in the Public Domain
Full text linkMany believe intellectual property has overreached, and that policymakers must respond. In this Essay, I argue that the critique may have merit, but private parties are in some cases taking matters into their own hands. Firms and individuals are increasingly injecting information into the public domain with the explicit goal of preempting or undermining the potential property rights of economic adversaries. Biotechnology firms invest millions of dollars in public domain gene sequence databases, to prevent hold-ups by firms with patents on short gene sequences. Major software firms fight entrenched rivals by investing millions of dollars, contributing to open source operating systems. In both cases, property-preempting investments (PPIs) are made to offset the effects of competitors\u27 property rights. Individuals and nonprofits are joining in too, with initiatives such as the Creative Commons project. All of these major private investments in the public domain reveal a self-correcting feature of the intellectual property system that has been overlooked until now, and signal that public lawmaking is not the only arena in which the excesses of intellectual property may be addressed
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