How do you read a patent and what subject matter is patentable? What is the purpose of a patent? Who is an inventor on the patent if work is done by many people on the project? What is the process of obtaining a patent in my country and globally? Read this chapter to see how you could lose commercialization rights to your own invention. When exactly does an invention or idea become patentable? Once you own a patent, how can you make money from it? What is the process of licensing and the key terms that should be negotiated in such a license agreement? What is the use of a copyright or a trade secret in biotech? What exactly constitutes patent infringement ? These questions and many others are addressed in this chapter on intellectual property.

The brands of universities are best understood not as trademarks, but as geographical indications. The conventional American theory of trademarks has always been an ill fit for the merchandising uses that universities enforce their brands to protect, because those uses are grounded in anti-misappropriation impulses that traditional American trademark law has always looked on with ambivalence. But the use of a signifier to channel material support from consumers to a productive community (such as a university), out of support for the community itself rather than out of market demand for the community’s outputs, is perfectly consistent with the justifications typically offered for protection of geographical indications. While understanding university brands as geographical indications provides analytical clarity, it also reveals such brands have a potential dark side: they may give the community’s most generous and idiosyncratic benefactors an outsize role in deciding disputes over the community’s priorities and values.

Meccano Ltd promoted a particular type of subjectivity: the ‘Meccano Boy’. This construction toy schooled the child in scientific education, social participation, civic roles, life within a profession and in building the material infrastructure of modernity. Playing with Meccano encouraged translation of an intangible idea represented in two dimensions into material forms through the production of three-dimensional compositions of machinery or models. We compare the legal interpretation of this form of play with its broader cultural significance in creating a base of socially connected consumers, orchestrated to extract commercial value from educational play. Meccano did not involve free play or simply making educational models. A toy for making toys, Meccano was marketed as training for adulthood. Through the establishment of Meccano guilds and the relevance of the Meccano Magazine, children, their fathers and a wider brotherhood were interpellated as active developers of Meccano. It was a brand and activity that Meccano designed for international appeal and where the child was happily engaged in play that supported a later life that contributed to international industrialisation.

This chapter presents some preliminary evidence about the way both mining firms and suppliers innovate in Chile and whether (and, if yes, how) they protect their innovations. It includes semi-structured interviews with senior executives at a sample of Chilean mining firms, mining, equipment, technology and services (METS) and universities. This analysis is complemented with information coming from an online survey applied to 300 Chilean METS. Finally, a group of twenty lawyers specializing in intellectual property was surveyed to provide their opinions regarding: the role of IP in the mining sector, the likely benefits of the introduction of a patent box mechanism in the Chilean legislation, and the role the Chilean IP Office (INAPI) is playing in this area. Interviews with INAPI’s senior staff members also present the policies implemented over the last years in order to promote the use of IP instruments in the mining sector.

This chapter focuses on the scope and content of the Intellectual Property Chapter of the TPP, to examine how strict the new IP international protection and enforcement standard is, and to determine how far it goes beyond the existing FTAs and TRIPS. TPP provisions are compared with the “Pre-TPP relevant standards” (both intra-TPP and extra-TPP), and, of course, the WTO TRIPS Agreement. We looked at the NAFTA (the US, Canada, and Mexico) and the US agreements with Singapore, Chile, Australia, the CAFTA countries, Peru, and Korea (KORUS FTA). Some references were made to agreements signed by the European Union with Korea (EU--KOREA FTA) and the one with Canada, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), as well as to the TPP predecessor -- the P4 Agreement -- signed between Brunei Darussalam, Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore. While reviewing the enforcement provisions, comparisons were made to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

As an area of legal study and practice, intellectual property (or IP) law lacks the conceptual coherence of an internally consistent and discrete law subject like contract, crimina’ or tort, which each has its own normative rules applicable throughout, or even one that describes a category of law involving the application of a number of such law subjects to a particular subject matter, like environmental law or entertainment law. For this reason, mixing and matching notions or terms from one area of IP law with those from others can be at best confusing and at worst dangerously misleading, however beguiling it may be to do so. To avoid both, the well-crafted IP treatise provides invaluable assistance and clarification.

Given all the circumstances surrounding the attempts to oversee the performance of legal academics and their research efforts, it is remarkable that Sam Ricketson has written and published his treatises on the law of intellectual property (in Australia), the 100-year history of the Berne Convention and the Paris Convention. Hindsight is always 20/20 as noted so frequently by the courts when considering inventiveness and what was obvious at a given prior point in time. it was not obvious at the time of commencing these works that they would be so successful Yet hindsight tells us that Ricketson’s decisions to invest so much of his time and energy into writing his treatises were rational and obvious decisions and the outcomes for both himself and the multiple audiences that enjoy the fruits of his labour equally predictable.

As with any other post-Communist country, Albania’s legislation on intellectual property rights tries to keep pace with the country’s evolving social and economic needs. The first main IP law was enacted in 1999,1 nine years after the fall of Communism. Since then, the Albanian Parliament has been active in ratifying international agreements on intellectual property rights as well as establishing an effective system for their enforcement in conformity with EU and international standards.2 The desire to be part of an integrated international economic system and the ambition to gain membership in the European Union are undoubtedly important reasons for IP legislation. However, the intention of the Albanian legislator to recognize intellectual property protection for the fruits of human ingenuity is not a modern trend. It precedes the Communist system. Yet little is known about the functioning of the intellectual property regime in Albania. Although this may be due to Communist isolationism and the limited relevance of the Albanian market for the international IP system, this chapter will show that, in fact, intellectual property protection in Albania is significantly interrelated with the current international IP and trade system.