Patents as an Incentive for Innovation

Patents as an Incentive for Innovation is a trailblazing book that analyses in depth how patent law today performs its function of stimulating innovation in the vital sectors of healthcare, agriculture, artificial intelligence and communications technology. Patents are a reward for human inventiveness. An effective patent system must provide incentives for innovation, safeguard dynamic competition and protect the public interest – a balancing act fraught with difficulty in the ‘connected’ global world.

What’s in this book:

Patent specialists, practitioners and scholars from various jurisdictions assiduously illustrate how patent rights can be utilized to incentivize investments in researching and developing socially critical innovations without sacrificing the public’s interest in sharing the benefits that are yielded. The following issues of patent rights surfaced on investigation:

• protectability and morality of according private rights over materials derived from the human body;
• licensing on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms;
• the supplementary protection certificate (SPC) manufacturing waiver;
• patent eligibility of artificial intelligence-related inventions;
• excessive enforcement of patents by patent assertion entities;
• enforcement of second medical use innovations;
• the so-called farmer’s privilege, the farm-save seed exemption, and breeders’ rights;
• international trade regulations and their influence on patent systems;
• human enhancement technologies and the consequences of patenting them;
• specifics of patent protection for biologic medicines;
• challenges posed by artificial intelligence for the disclosure requirement in patent law; and
• standard essential patent licensing, particularly in the context of the 5G standard.

Perspectives, such as protectability criteria, length and scope of the granted protection, mechanisms for dealing with the friction between generalized application and specialized concerns, and rights enforcement, were attended to by the authors. These aspects are analysed on the domestic, international and global levels.

How this will help you:

The COVID-19 pandemic has elucidated the urgent need to find a middle ground between innovation and access in healthcare and other technologies, a need rooted in patent law. Considering the problems discussed – and solutions offered – in this collection of expert essays are of tremendous practical and cultural significance, the book will prove to be invaluable to practitioners, policymakers and researchers in patent law and other fields of intellectual property law.