Veranstaltungen

Abstract:

Patent offices around the world face massive backlogs of applications, which threatens to slow down the pace of technological progress. However, economists lack analytical tools to address the issue. This paper provides a model of patent backlog inspired from the traffic congestion literature.

Inventors in the cohort are heterogeneous with respect to desired patent pendency duration and react in anticipation of the waiting time resulting from the backlog. They can accelerate or slow down pendency duration by adapting their filing strategy. We find that the backlog impedes patent examination progress by providing incentives to strategically manipulate pendency.

We discuss three policy responses: increasing examination capacity; introducing a penalty fee; and altering the value of pending applications.

About the Speaker

Luc Peeperkorn is Principal Expert in Antitrust Policy at the European Commission. He studied economics and political science at the University of Amsterdam and worked as an assistant professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He was a central figure in various teams which created what is now called the effects-based approach in EU competition policy, in particular by making new rules for supply and distribution agreements, for de minimis agreements and for technology transfer agreements. He also co-authored the Guidance on the Commission’s enforcement priorities in applying Article 102. He teaches at the Brussels School of Competition and was recently a Senior Emile Noël Fellow at NYU.

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Im Bereich der wirtschaftlichen Nutzung von Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien findet seit einigen Jahren weltweit eine Art „Patentkrieg“ statt. Die von den Rechtsordnungen äußerst schlagkräftig geschmiedeten Waffen in jenen Auseinandersetzungen um Marktanteile und Umsatzerlöse in Bereichen wie etwa Smartphones, Tablet-PCs und Internettechnologien sind Patente, die Schlachtfelder in zunehmendem Maße gerichtliche Verfahren. Es stellt sich die Frage, ob das geltende deutsche Recht, insbesondere § 139 Abs. 1 PatG wegen der im Wesentlichen einschränkungslosen Zubilligung eines Unterlassungsanspruchs noch den verfassungsrechtlichen Anforderungen an Gesetze entspricht, die den Inhalt und die Schranken des Patenteigentums nach Art. 14 Abs. 1 S. 2 und Abs. 2 GG bestimmen. Es fehlt an einer ausreichenden normativen Vorsorge gegen unverhältnismäßige Beeinträchtigungen grundrechtlicher Belange Dritter bei der Ausübung des eigentumsrechtlichen Primärrechts. Bis zu einer gesetzlichen Neuregelung ist es Aufgabe der allgemein zuständigen Zivilgerichte, im Rahmen patentrechtlicher Verletzungsverfahren und bei der Beurteilung der Unterlassungsbegehren nach § 139 Abs. 1 PatG den verfassungsrechtlichen Anforderungen der gerechten Abwägung nach Maßgabe des Verhältnismäßigkeitsgrundsatzes Rechnung zu tragen.

Einladung zur Veranstaltung

Thema des diesjährigen Forums ist „Koexistenz und Kumulation im Immaterialgüterrecht“. Eine ausführliche Beschreibung des Themas hat Thomas Jaeger dankenswerterweise in folgender Broschüre vorgenommen:
Beschreibung und Agenda

Referent: Jan Walter

The main purpose of this seminar is to turn away from understanding negotiations as competition with a winner and a looser and rather to appreciate negotiations for their potential to enlarge the pie, the value of the final result. For a good negotiator to be able to reap the benefits, phase of preparations is not to be underestimated. This is especially so with the world of multilateral negotiations turning from monetary-based bargaining to value-based argumentation.
Two intertwined angles will be offered – the science of negotiation and the art thereof. The seminar will strive to go further, to multilateral dimension. Due to general demands for higher transparency in any negotiations and the growing number of relevant players in international organizations, the number of actors and stakeholders is on the rise. Multilateral is an increasingly common form of negotiations – in business, public sector, inter-governmental arena. The lecture will explore the potential benefits and pitfalls of third-party intervention, for example mediation, facilitation or chairing. Further, if time permits, coalition-building, coalition-maintenance and coalition-destruction will be examined as useful but dangerous tools to use.
Practical examples mainly, but not exclusively, from international IP negotiations will be used to support the notions.
 
About Jan Walter: With his background neither in law nor in IP, Jan enters the MIPLC grounds with a slightly different value proposition; one of an advocacy professional and negotiator. Jan’s academic background lies in international trade, international politics and international management, studied at the University of Economics in Prague and the London School of Economics and Political Science. After short experience in business environment, Jan joined the Czech civil service on the dynamic wave of the first-ever Czech Presidency of EU Council. Jan remained working for his government for seven years, most of it in Geneva. His responsibilities included, inter alia, WIPO where he eventually chaired one of the regional groups and was able to witness few successes and many failures at the inner-most negotiating table. After leaving the public service in early 2015, Jan focused his interest and experience to educational activities and recently also joined the world of lobbying on behalf of animal protection.

The IP Dispute Resolution Forum wants to offer an international platform to analyze, discuss and develop solutions to legal and economic issues in the field of IP disputes.

A particular focus will be the question of whether, and if so how, arbitration and mediation procedures can be used as an efficient supplement or even alternative to state court proceedings. The call for efficient dispute resolution mechanisms is getting louder in particular in the current conflicts regarding standard essential patents and so called FRAND licenses. Furthermore, the UPC Agreement provides that a Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre shall be established. So now is the time to think about how alternative dispute resolution mechanisms should work in field of Intellectual Property.

We believe that the IP Dispute Resolution Forum would be a good place to start discussing ideas and to develop a framework for practical solutions and procedures. At present, the initiative is led by enthusiasts from different practice areas with diverse backgrounds, namely, judges Dr. Matthias Zigann (Presiding Judge at the Munich Regional Court I) and Dr. Georg Werner (Judge at the Munich Regional Court I, as of October 2015 seconded to the Xth division of the German Federal Supreme Court), Dr. Peter Picht (Senior Research Fellow at MPI), Raffael Probst (former managing director of Munich Center for Dispute Resolution), Dan Bauer (entrepreneur and project consultant), Marco Stief (Partner, Maiwald), Dr. Axel Walz (Partner, King & Wood Mallesons LLP).

Intellectual property plays an important role in the global economy through its impact on technology diffusion, knowledge transfer and competition. There is, however, dramatic heterogeneity across both industries and countries in these effects and their implications for economic growth. In this paper, we exploit a newly developed algorithmic concordance that links patents to industry and trade classifications to characterize how patents affect the structure of global value chains. Using recent techniques to decompose gross exports and construct bilateral measures of value-added trade, we test how domestic and international (bilateral) patenting specifically related to different industries affects production fragmentation as measured by decreases in the value-added export (VAX) ratio.

Over the period 1999-2009 for 18 industries and 35 countries, we find that increased international patenting is associated with greater production fragmentation. This effect is particularly strong for “imported” or inbound international patent applications. While there is some heterogeneity among industries in this relationship, there is much greater heterogeneity among countries: For several countries, “exported” patents reduce production fragmentation and “imported” patents increase production fragmentation. As empirical research into the structure of global value chains expands, the role of patents and other forms of intellectual property merit careful consideration. The exploratory results we present are intended to provide a point of departure for continued characterization of these interrelationships.

Please drop us a line if you plan to attend: fabian.gaessler(at)ip.mpg.de

This paper challenges the conventional belief that entrepreneurship is an unstable career path. Entrepreneurship is shown to decrease rather than increase individuals’ turnover tendencies. This finding persists after controlling for lock-in effects associated with sunk costs and unfavorable outside options.

Entrepreneurship is argued to represent a high quality job-match for individuals who otherwise portray above average turnover rates. Arguably, matching emerges from (i) preferences for independence, (ii) skills composition, and (iii) redeployability of human capital into new settings. The counter-intuitive finding – entrepreneurship yields greater employment stability – has fundamental implications for our understanding of entrepreneurship entry and labor market dynamics.