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The article discusses the interpretation of patent claims and the scope of protection under the European Patent Convention. It presents two approaches to considering equivalents in patent claims, emphasizing the importance of finding a balance between protecting patent holders and ensuring legal certainty for third parties. The case study involves a dispute over a patent for a water balloon filling apparatus, highlighting the complexities of patent law and the need to consider the inventive concept perspective. The article provides insights into the legal framework governing patent interpretation and the application of the two-step approach in determining patent infringement. [Extracted from the article]

Recent economics of knowledge studies have highlighted the strong positive effects that the limited exhaustibility of knowledge and its cumulability exert on the recombinant generation of new technological knowledge. While existing empirical investigations primarily focus on the knowledge generation and technology production functions, the analysis of the cost of knowledge has received less attention. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the dynamics and determinants of patent costs in the European Union in the period 1992–2012. The analysis of patent unit costs in European countries, measured as the amount of research and development (R&D) expenditure per patent application to the European Patent Office (EPO), shows a steady decline and clear convergence toward lower levels, both in time and across countries. We find that a larger stock of patents and a higher technological variety and coherence of its composition are associated with a sharper reduction in patent costs. Our findings suggest that, in Europe, ideas have been getting cheaper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study considers the possibility of patenting animal breeds as objects of intellectual property, taking into account the legislation and law enforcement practices of the European Union. It presents a retrospective analysis and detailed interpretation of the conventional and directive provisions related to the patent protection of animal breeds, and characterizes the differences between the latter and the microbiological process. It was observed that the position of the European Patent Office on this issue was not always unanimous, which was manifested in the contradictory interpretation of the relevant, not perfectly formulated, legislative norms. It was analyzed under what conditions the current position of the EU manifests itself in the fact that an animal breed, as a product of an exclusively biological process, cannot be subject to patent protection. In addition, the concepts of "biological" and "technical processes" were interpreted as additional criteria for patentability concerning living organisms. Attention was also paid to the ethical component of biotechnological inventions and the still problematic aspects of animal breeding as possible results of biotechnological activity were emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its decision, the UPC Court of Appeal confirms the application of key principles of patent claim interpretation for unitary patents. With regard to the inventive step, a tentative path is chosen that does not clearly follow the problem–solution approach of the European Patent Office and instead, comprehensively takes the state of the art into account at the outset. The standard for the necessary probability of infringement and validity is set at a preponderance of probability (sufficient degree of certainty, ie more likely than not). Furthermore, the temporal and factual necessity of the injunction is also important in determining whether a preliminary injunction should be ordered. Ultimately, the granting of injunctive relief hinges on an overall weighing of the interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the role of brokers in the regional innovation network and its influence on innovative and collaborative outcomes. For this purpose, we make use of data from the European Patent Office and Eurostat in the period 1986–2015. We first build the regional collaboration network based on co-inventorship ties, and then we identify the brokerage roles played by each region, using the original taxonomy proposed by Gould and Fernandez (1989), to disentangle their impact on innovation and collaboration. Finally, we investigate regional collaboration intensity and how it interacts with brokerage roles, highlighting its mediating effect. Our findings indicate that brokerage roles contribute to the extension of collaboration networks, but also that they are not efficient for the creation of innovation. Collaboration intensity, on the other hand, enhances both innovation and collaborative outcomes and shows how a region can benefit from being a broker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies have noted the importance of measurement tools that track the contributions of the circular bioeconomy and other developments towards sustainable development. In this study, we examined the EU-27 as a whole and found that its circular bioeconomy, measured by the 41 indicators we used, generally progressed over the period 2004--2021. Research and development personnel and Persons employed in circular economy sectors were ranked as the most progressing indicators over the studied period, together with Patent applications to the European Patent Office, which supports the idea that the circular bioeconomy uses novel technologies and requires research to develop them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The absence of observable innovation data for a firm often leads us to exclude or classify these firms as non-innovators. We assess the reliability of six methods for dealing with unreported innovation using several different counterfactuals for firms without reported R&D or patents. These tests reveal that excluding firms without observable innovation or imputing them as zero innovators and including a dummy variable can lead to biased parameter estimates for observed innovation and other explanatory variables. Excluding firms without patents is especially problematic, leading to false-positive results in empirical tests. Our tests suggest using multiple imputation to handle unreported innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data on green patents filed at the European Patent Office from 1980 to 1984, this paper investigates the effect of increasing government R&D budget on green technology spillovers. Spillovers are measured with patent forward citations over the period 1981–1988. The level of government R&D budget is instrumented leveraging the unexpected occurrence of the Chernobyl nuclear accident—that exogenously pushed governments to reduce their energy-related R&D budgets—in a difference in differences setting. 2SLS results show that a 10% increase in government R&D increases by some 0.7% the number of citations received by green patents. Although positive and significant, the small magnitude of the estimated elasticity suggests that government R&D takes time to let innovation spillovers from green technologies to materialize with some relevance. Interestingly, increasing government R&D expenditures fosters green technology spillovers across traditional (non-green) fields and enlarges the technological breadth of inventions citing green patents. Overall, I conclude that government R&D fosters green knowledge spillovers, accelerates hybridization processes and favors technological diversification around green technologies. However, these positive effects seem to materialize at a slow pace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the classification system from the European Patent Office (EPO), we identify almost 600,000 patent applications for fourth industrial revolution technologies from 1986 to 2015. We contribute to the economic literature by seeking to answer two research questions: (1) What is the effect of legal breath (and other indicators) on the quality of innovations in the fourth industrial revolution, (2) How does the IP culture (utilitarism vs. natural law) explain these differences? We find that the legal breadth of a patent positively affects the quality of innovations in the fourth industrial revolution. Interestingly, this impact of legal breadth may be driven by historical path dependencies and ways in which the two philosophical schools (utilitarism vs. natural law) have shaped the patent system in Anglo-Saxon countries versus continental Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to identify the countries with the highest technological development in 2022, i.e. those with the highest number of patents applied for and granted. The object of study is patent activity as an indicator of technological development. The subject of the study is the patent activity conducted through the European Patent Office in 2022. Using empirical research methods (comparative method, statistical methods) the countries with the highest patent activity in 2022 are identified and the leading technological countries are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern toothpastes are complex formulations with various ingredients. The aim of this study was to analyze the improvement of toothpaste formulations from 1900 to 2023 focusing on active ingredients with remineralizing, antibacterial, or plaque-removing effects, and to discuss their influence on caries prevention. For this, worldwide patent applications were searched using the international database Espacenet from the European Patent Office. Additionally, toothpaste products were searched using the Mintel product database from 1996 to 2023. The searched ingredients were (in alphabetical order): calcium carbonate, calcium phosphates, hydrated silica, sodium fluoride, sodium lauryl sulfate, triclosan, xylitol, and zinc salts as they are known from the scientific literature to be remineralizing or antibacterial/antiplaque agents. It was shown that the number of patent applications containing these ingredients significantly increased since the 1970s. As these ingredients have remineralizing, antibacterial, or plaque-removing effects, they all can contribute to caries prevention. In conclusion, and within the limitations of this approach, this study shows that toothpaste formulations have greatly improved over the past decades by using various active anticaries ingredients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whey is well known to be nutritive and to provide significant nutritional value when included in foods. Therefore, trying to make this product even more valuable, in 1988, a patent was granted giving rise to microparticulated whey proteins (MWP). In that way, the present work aimed to review the literature on patents that develop and/or apply MWP in food production until December 2022. Keywords, such as "whey", "protein", and "microparticulated" were used in the search for patents in Espacenet (patents database of the European Patent Office—EPO). A total of 60 patents were reviewed in this study which include the MWP as a fat substitute; as an ingredient to improve texture, flavor, and viscosity, or as a stabilizer for food products, like yoghurt, cheese, salad dressings, and acidified drinks, among others. Of the 24 companies listed in this review, at least six have MWP products being marketed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether firm performance is related to the accumulated stock of technological knowledge associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and, if so, whether the firm's history in 4IR technology development affects such a relationship. We exploit a rich longitudinal matched patent-firm data set on the population of large firms that filed 4IR patents at the European Patent Office (EPO) between 2009 and 2014, while reconstructing their patent stocks from 1985 onward. To identify 4IR patents, we use a novel two-step procedure proposed by EPO (2020, Patents and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Global Technology Trends Enabling the Data-Driven Economy , European Patent Office), based on Cooperative Patent Classification codes and on a full-text patent search. Our results show a positive and significant relationship between firms' stocks of 4IR patents and labor and total factor productivity. We also find that firms with a long history in 4IR patent filings benefit more from the development of 4IR technological capabilities than later applicants. Conversely, we find that firm profitability is not significantly related to the stock of 4IR patents, which suggests that the returns from 4IR technological developments may be slow to be cashed in. Finally, we find that the positive relationship with productivity is stronger for 4IR-related wireless technology and for artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, and big data analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological progress generally is not disruptive but sequential. Innovations build on prior innovations, typically by presenting improvements or complements. Under patent law, such follow-on innovation meets with an obstacle if the use of the invention underlying it infringes a prior patent, and if, for one reason or another, the owner of that prior patent prefers, as it may, to refuse granting a license. It is only in case the follow-on (or 'second') invention involves an important technical advance of considerable economic significance in relation to the invention claimed in the prior (or 'first') patent that in Europe, in accordance with Art. 31 TRIPS, national patent laws provide for a right of the owner of the second patent to obtain, by way of a decision of the patent office or of a court, a dependency license. By contrast, the EU's system of unitary patent protection does not provide for a dependency licensing regime. Instead, Regulation 1257/2021 on the European patent with unitary effect refers the matter to national law. This means that despite the importance of its invention the owner of a dependent patent will never obtain a mandatory license covering the Internal Market but only territorially limited national licenses for which it must apply separately in each Member State, go through multiple different procedures and comply with different national requirements. The absurdity of such hindering of follow-on innovation in the Internal Market by regulatory abstention is no less as regards national patents that the European Patent Office grants as a bundle in the form of the European patent and that are now additionally held together by the uniform infringement rules of the Unified Patent Court Agreement. After all, that category of a European patent is supposed to represent an equivalent alternative to the unitary patent and, therefore, ought to meet the same Internal Market requirements. Therefore, this study proposes to harmonize Member States' dependency licensing regimes and to complement the system of unitary patent protection accordingly. To this end, it presents the common principles of national regimes, analyzes the particular need for and characteristics of modern mandatory licensing rules and discusses the deficits of alternative approaches that might be available under EU competition law. A particular emphasis is put on distinguishing dependency licensing from compulsory licensing in the public interest, and on the functional complementarity existing between incentivizing inventions by patent protection and stimulating follow-on innovation by mandatory licensing regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversification of regions into new technologies is driven by the degree of relatedness to existing capabilities already present in the region. In cases where opportunities for diversification are rather limited, external knowledge that spills over from neighboring regions or from farther away might become an important driver of regional diversification. Despite the relative importance of interregional knowledge flows via collaborative work, we still have a very limited understanding of how collaboration networks across regions might facilitate diversification processes. The present study investigates the diversification patterns of European metropolitan and nonmetropolitan regions into new knowledge domains via technology classes reported in patent applications to the European Patent Office. The findings indicate that externally oriented inventor collaboration networks increase the likelihood that a new technology specialization enters a region, but this external orientation is less important for related diversification than for unrelated diversification. Further, the results demonstrate that interregional collaboration networks help diversification into unrelated technologies if external knowledge sourcing is based on a diverse set of regions and if collaboration is intense within companies located in distinct regions. Within-firm collaborations across regions can compensate for missing related skills in metropolitan and in nonmetropolitan regions alike but are especially important in nonmetropolitan regions. These results provide new evidence about the importance of knowledge flows within multilocation firms in the technological knowledge diversification of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Osteoarthritis is considered a degenerative joint disease that is characterised by inflammation, chronic pain, and functional limitation. The increasing development of nanotechnology in drug delivery systems has provided new ideas and methods for osteoarthritis therapy. This review aimed to evaluate patents that have developed innovations, therapeutic strategies, and alternatives using nanotechnology in osteoarthritis treatment. The results show patents deposited from 2015 to November 2021 in the online databases European Patent Office and World Intellectual Property Organisation. A total of 651 patents were identified for preliminary assessment and 16 were selected for full reading and discussion. The evaluated patents are focused on the intraarticular route, oral route, and topical route for osteoarthritis treatment. The intraarticular route presented a higher patent number, followed by the oral and topical routes, respectively. The development of new technologies allows us to envision a promising and positive future in osteoarthritis treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much evidence exists of the increasing levels of research cooperation and globalization in the knowledge generation process. This paper aims to assess the determinants of the quality of research collaborations, using a sample of joint patent applications to the European Patent Office between 2000 and 2012. The results of the empirical analysis show that the limited exhaustibility of knowledge and the geographical distance among research partners are crucial determinants of research quality. Specifically, the non-exhaustible character of knowledge and cross-border knowledge creation enhance patent quality. Moreover, the distance among research partners exerts a curvilinear effect, as the quality of innovation increases when partners are either in spatial proximity or distant among each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical review of the case law of the European Patent Office (EPO) and some Member States regarding inventive step and is aimed, in particular, at judges at the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and practitioners before that court. The linchpin of the review is a discrepancy between, on the one hand, the legal principle of avoiding hindsight and, on the other, the EPO's belief that hindsight is a necessary element of an objective assessment of inventive step. Although this aspect must be separated from the question of how the original disclosure affects the assessment of inventive step, in particular the formulation of the problem (see G 2/21), there are nevertheless mutual dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Verimlilik Dergisi is the property of Verimlilik Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents evidence that patent value varies with random examiner assignment at the U.S. Patent Office. Prior work analyzed firm growth as a function of review by "easy" examiners who grant patents at a high rate. The current research looks past whether a patent is granted and instead focuses on how assignment to an "easy" or "hard" examiner influences the attributes of resultant patents. Focusing on their propensities to reject applications on novelty or obviousness grounds, analysis finds that patents issued by lenient examiners tend to be broader in scope, are more valuable to their owners, and elicit a larger stock market response when granted. Further analysis quantifies the level of variation ("noise") among examiners. This inquiry finds that the noise level in issuing novelty rejections decreases with examiner experience, while variation among examiners issuing obviousness rejections actually increases with experience. A third line of investigation presents evidence that "stricter" examiners disproportionately reach the correct examination relative to more lenient counterparts. This conclusion is supported by "twin application" analysis comparing outcomes of related U.S. and European applications. Consistent with the literature using this method, the European Patent Office's outcome is considered the "gold standard" for examination, and thus, its decision to grant or deny is assumed correct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil has a megadiversity that includes marine species that are distributed along 800 km of shoreline. This biodiversity status holds promising biotechnological potential. Marine organisms are important sources of novel chemical species, with applications in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, chemical, and nutraceutical fields. However, ecological pressures derived from anthropogenic actions, including the bioaccumulation of potentially toxic elements and microplastics, impact promising species. This review describes the current status of the biotechnological and environmental aspects of seaweeds and corals from the Brazilian coast, including publications from the last 5 years (from January 2018 to December 2022). The search was conducted in the main public databases (PubChem, PubMed, Science Direct, and Google Scholar) and in the Espacenet database (European Patent Office—EPO) and the Brazilian National Property Institute (INPI). Bioprospecting studies were reported for seventy-one seaweed species and fifteen corals, but few targeted the isolation of compounds. The antioxidant potential was the most investigated biological activity. Despite being potential sources of macro- and microelements, there is a literature gap regarding the presence of potentially toxic elements and other emergent contaminants, such as microplastics, in seaweeds and corals from the Brazilian coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nachrichten aus der Chemie is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a metabolic syndrome that can be considered a growing health problem in the world. High blood glucose levels are one of the most notable clinical signs. Currently, new therapeutic alternatives have been tackled from clinicians' and scientists' points of view. Natural products are considered a promising source, due to the huge diversity of metabolites with pharmaceutical applications. Therefore, this review aimed to uncover the latest advances in this field as a potential alternative to the current therapeutic strategies for the treatment of DM. This purpose is achieved after a patent review, using the Espacenet database of the European Patent Office (EPO) (2016–2022). Final screening allowed us to investigate 19 patents, their components, and several technology strategies in DM. Plants, seaweeds, fungi, and minerals were used as raw materials in the patents. Additionally, metabolites such as tannins, organic acids, polyphenols, terpenes, and flavonoids were found to be related to the potential activity in DM. Moreover, the cellular transportation of active ingredients and solid forms with special drug delivery profiles is also considered a pharmaceutical technology strategy that can improve their safety and efficacy. From this perspective, natural products can be a promissory source to obtain new drugs for DM therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the new technological era, artificial intelligence (AI) reigns supreme. With the assistance of AI systems, society is undergoing a radical transformation. AI may not only soon replace human labor in many industrial sectors, but as AI gains the power to generate greater inventions, it may also outsmart human inventors. How should patent law and policy adapt to the formidable challenges of the AI era? One of these challenges, addressed by patent offices and courts in 2020 and beyond, is whether AI inventorship should be recognized. The United States Patent and Trademark Office and European Patent Office declined to recognize the autonomous AI system DABUS as an inventor despite its two inventions. Courts in the United States and United Kingdom upheld these rulings. However, the Federal Court of Australia and the South African Patent Office steered patent law in the opposite direction, accepting DABUS as an inventor and thereby legally recognizing AI inventorship. This Article argues that these divergent approaches to determining the legal status of AI inventorship fail to address proper policy considerations central to shaping AI and patent law in service of the public interest. Applying broad-based, forward-looking policy considerations, this Article puts forward three legal principles for protecting AIgenerated inventions. The first principle draws on the doctrine of "piercing the corporate veil" to ascertain the sole patent proprietor of AI-generated inventions. It attempts to remove the unnecessary cost of protecting AI systems that are incapable of securing ownership of their inventions. The second principle considers the capacity to take legal responsibility as a means of evaluating whether AI systems should be recognized as inventors. It channels an ethos mandating that any grant of patent rights be conditioned on certain legal responsibilities. The third principle dictates that patent protection of AI-generated inventions must promote robustness of the public domain through the free flow of information and knowledge not subject to proprietary control. Together, these principles can better protect a wide range of public interests implicated in the patent protection of AI inventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Patents Court has held that a European Patent covering dish-shaped abrasive particles is invalid because it would require an undue burden to produce particles across the scope of the claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a database that classifies all patent applications filed at either the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) or the European Patent Office (EPO) as being either product patents, process patents or 'mixed patents'. We use the share of claims that refer to either product or process inventions which allows to classify all patent applications along a continuum of pure process patents and pure product patents. We find that process-oriented patents draw more on previous knowledge, are more original and more radical than product patents. Lower breadth of protection is positively associated with pure process patenting, whereas product and mixed variants can be protected more broadly. This characterisation uncovers heterogeneity of patented inventions that allows for a more sophisticated use of patent statistics. It can improve the accuracy of analyses, but also reveal new aspects related to property rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the network robustness of the technological capability base of 269 European metropolitan areas against the potential elimination of some of their capabilities. By doing so, it provides systematic evidence on how network robustness conditioned the economic resilience of these regions in the context of the 2008 economic crisis. The analysis concerns calls in the relevant literature for more in-depth analysis on the link between regional economic network structures and the resilience of regions to economic shocks. By adopting a network science approach that is novel to economic geographic inquiry, the objective is to stress test the technological resilience of regions by utilizing information on the coclassification of CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification) classes listed on European Patent Office patent documents. We find that European metropolitan areas show heterogeneous levels of technology network robustness. Further findings from regression analysis indicate that metropolitan regions with a more robust technological knowledge network structure exhibit higher levels of resilience with respect to changes in employment rates. This finding is robust to various random and targeted elimination strategies concerning the most frequently combined technological capabilities. Regions with high levels of employment in industry but with a vulnerable technological capacity base are particularly challenged by this aspect of regional economic resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study detailed here has been to identify the spatial pattern describing Poland's providers of Industry 4.0 technologies (i.e. the so-called digital entrepreneurs), and to determine the territorial potential for future clusters of these activities to develop across the country. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this article represents the literature's very first systematic attempt at a firm-level examination of the current and future "geography" of digital (Industry 4.0) enterprises. The identification of technology providers meeting the criterion reflected type of prevailing activity, by reference to international classifications of economic activity. At the first stage, systematic queries involving such various sources as company catalogues, websites of technology parks, clusters and industry associations, databases of the Patent Office of the Republic of Poland and European Patent Office (EPO) and data relating to the use of European Funds in Poland were used to identify 823 digital enterprises. In turn, reference to NACE codes of prevailing activity allowed for the identification of 30 industries represented by more than 0.5% of the companies identified (Annex 1). In a further step, location quotients (vis-à-vis the working-age population) were calculated for 426,000 active entities registered in the Polish National Court Register (KRS). This allowed for the identification of spatial concentrations on an industry-by-industry basis (Fig. 1-2). The synthetic indicator constructed (as the sum of weighted location quotients) offers an approximation of the potential particular places in Poland display, when it comes to the development of clusters of Industry 4.0 technology providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study is to examine the extent to which patents have an impact on GDP and net profit. The object of the study are the changes in the GDP of two technologically highly developed countries – Japan and South Korea, and two technologically underdeveloped countries – Russia and Brazil, as well as the changes in the net profit of leading companies in these countries. The subject of the study is the comparison of the impact of patent activity through newly issued patents by the European Patent Office, and unemployment and foreign direct investment at the macroeconomic level and the share price, gross income and gross debt at the microeconomic level. Comparative analysis and least squares method have been used. It is expected that the role of patent activity will be stronger in the considered technologically highly developed countries and companies and correspondingly weaker in the considered technologically underdeveloped countries and companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the patents of solar energy technologies in the organic Rankine cycle (ORC) applications. The conversion of low-quality thermal energy into electricity is one of the main characteristics of an ORC, making efficient and viable technologies available today. However, only a few and outdated articles that analyze patents that use solar energy technologies in ORC applications exist. This leads to a lack of updated information regarding the number of published patents, International Patent Classification (IPC) codes associated with them, technology life cycle status, and the most relevant patented developments. Thus, this article conducts a current investigation of patents published between January 2010 and May 2022 using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology and keywords. One thousand two hundred ninety-nine patents were obtained as part of the study and classified in F and Y groups of the IPC. The time-lapse analyzed was between January 2010 and May 2022. In 2014 and 2015, a peak of published patents was observed. China (CN) was the country that published the most significant number of patents worldwide. However, the European Patent Office (EP), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WO), and the United States (US) publish the patents with the highest number of patent citations. Furthermore, the possible trend regarding the development of patents for each technology is presented. A high-performance theoretical ORC plant based on the patent information analyzed by this article is introduced. Finally, exploration of IPC revealed 17 codes related to solar energy technologies in ORC applications not indexed in the main search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Transformations in Business & Economics is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has identified nanotechnology as one of the prominent technologies of recent times (WIPO Magazine ‒ August 2011). Nanotechnology has a wide variety of applications in the field of medicine which are leading to the evolution of a new branch of medical science – nanomedicine. This involves using particles or materials within the size range of one nanometre and a thousand nanometres to diagnose, treat, and prevent various diseases. Biomedical nanotechnology, bionanotechnology, and nanomedicines are applications of nanotechnology in medicine and this article covers these three areas under the umbrella-term 'nanomedicines.' The European Union is a significant player in the wider nanotechnology market (including nanomedicines). At the European Patent Office (EPO), the number of nanotechnology patent applications (including nanomedicines) is increasing every year. The European Patent Convention (EPC) – the unified European patent system – came into existence in 1973. It provided patent protection for valid technologies according to the patentability criteria provided by EPC, and Art. 27(1) of TRIPS directs its signatories to offer patent protection for every technology equally. However, nanotechnology's unique nature poses a threat to the existing patent law. This paper critically analyses certain decisions by the EPO and its Boards of Appeal considering the technological speciality of nanotechnology inventions with reference to nanomedicines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bioenergy is an important renewable energy source. Its development depends more on technological innovation, especially collaborative innovation. As patent data shows the latest technological progress, it is considered to be one of the indicators describing technological innovation. This paper analyzes the accumulation process of bioenergy technology innovation capabilities in different countries or regions from the perspective of co-patents. We collected all co-patents in bioenergy field in the European Patent Office (EPO) from 1976 to 2018, and used social network analysis to visualize the nodes, clusters and their relationships in the inventor, transnational inventor and country co-patent networks. The empirical results indicate that the number of co-patents has noticeably increased since 2008. The most common technology areas comprise biofuels, biochemistry and enzymology. China has the largest number of co-patents in bioenergy field and it is prominent in the inventor co-patent network. The United States is more important in the transnational inventor co-patent network and the country co-patent network, and both are dominant. The research on the status of co-patents can provide a new perspective for technological innovation, which will help make future technology planning of different countries more rationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to protect the creations of artificial intelligence ("AI") systems through copyright law is one of the most significant and complex legal issues of our time. Debated by stakeholders around the world, the issue has so far evaded consensus. However, a series of administrative and judicial rulings has altered the landscape. In 2019, a Chinese district court affirmed the copyrightability of a news article written by an AI-powered robot, clarifying that it was the AI developer that should be deemed copyright owner of the news article. In 2020, the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office, and the United Kingdom High Court prominently denied patent applications designating an AI system as an inventor. This Article reveals the profound implications of these recent AI rulings for copyright protection of AI-generated works. It examines how these rulings shed new light on the nature and scope of authorship and ownership, two legal issues that are central to deciding whether and how AI-generated works merit copyright protection. Drawing on its in-depth study of the recent AI rulings, the Article proposes a broad-based, forward-looking approach to protecting AI-generated works through a two-tiered legal mechanism. It suggests that legislators may consider awarding sui generis rights to AI works generated with human contributions, while those generated autonomously by AI systems without such contributions should be placed in the public domain without copyright protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An automatic model selection procedure for Box- Jenkins time series models is used to forecast future levels of annual incoming patent filings at the European Patent Office. Selection of the best model uses either the Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) or a novel data based version of the Exact Information Criterion called |EICw| that is developed here. The methods are applied separately to autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and to autoregressive distributed lag (ADL) models. For ADL, explanatory variables include terms that are based on world Gross Domestic Product and world Research and Development Expenditures series. We take a multi-year approach to study a sequence of overlapping 20 year data windows. Selections based on the two information criteria are made on each window. Different models can be selected by the two criteria. We compare the forecasting accuracy of the models for five years beyond the windows. Generally it appears that ADL models have lower forecast errors than ARIMA models. On the whole, the selections based on AIC have lower forecast errors for ARIMA models, while selections based on |EICw| have lower forecast errors for ADL models. There is some serial correlation between the successive windows for the AIC values of its selected models that is not shown for the |EICw| values of its selected models. There is also an unexpected negative correlation between AIC values and forecast errors. |EICw| can be recommended as a complement to AIC for selecting models in forecasting contexts, to give a fuller picture of the interactions between models and data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to highlight the role of the circular economy in achieving sustainable development, to map the place of eco-innovation in the transformation process. In order to achieve this objective, the following is done: the essence of the circular economy is clarified and the concept of sustainable development is defined; the scope of eco-innovation is defined and the dynamics of patent activity in the field of environmental technologies for the period 2012-2021, carried out through the European Patent Office, are tracked.. In conclusion, some of the difficulties in achieving the objectives of the circular economy and eco-innovation are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture, as a key driver of innovative activity, has been largely analysed at the national and organisational levels by interdisciplinary studies. This article investigates the relationship between Schwartz's cultural dimensions and innovation, proxied by the number of patent applications to the European Patent Office, at the regional level. Using European Social Survey questionnaire, Eurostat and European Patent Office data and employing factor analysis and multilevel models, the link between culture and innovation is examined for regions of 26 European countries. The results of the analysis show that cultural differences are significantly related to differences in patenting even between regions of the same country. In particular, a higher autonomy–embeddedness score is significantly positively linked to patent applications at the regional level. The study highlights the usefulness of region-level cultural dimensions, providing evidence of more precise results obtained when these dimensions are used in the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, artificial intelligence-based translation tools for patent documents have undergone rapid development. In 2016, the World Intellectual Property Organization and the European Patent Office successively launched neural machine translation technology. Increasing the volume of English translations in Taiwan's Patent Search System is necessary to strengthen Taiwan's competitive advantages and connectivity with the world. The high-quality bilingual parallel corpora had a decisive influence on the effectiveness of the translation model. Neural machine translation systems for patent texts are trained using human-translated patent texts; thus, exploring the specific pattern of patent translation is vital for improving the future development of neural machine translation for patent texts and providing insight regarding changes in the translations of patent texts over time. In this study, the translation-specific features and patterns of patent translation were identified from accumulated human translations of patent texts over a long-term period. Findings are presented regarding (1) features of English translations, namely of patent abstracts, and the frequency and patterns of simplification, explicitation, normalisation, and levelling-out; (2) specific patterns of translated patent texts and comparable nontranslated patent texts from different periods; and (3) linguistic features of English translations of patent abstracts of the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]