Events

Cheryl Foong is a Lecturer at Curtin Law School in Western Australia, where she teaches Intellectual Property law and Competition law. Cheryl publishes in the area of digital copyright, open access and internet law, and regularly speaks at national and international IP conferences. Cheryl has a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School in New York, and previously interned at the United States Copyright Office (Office of Policy and International Affairs) in Washington, DC. She is a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours graduate from Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and recently completed her PhD at the Australian Catholic University.

Her presentation analyses the making available right as introduced by the WIPO Internet Treaties and evaluates current judicial approaches to the right in Australia, the US and the EU. It discusses the underlying justifications driving the disparate decisions on the right, and reveals the pitfalls of existing approaches. Distilling lessons from current approaches, this presentation proposes principles for the interpretation of the making available right. These principles are aimed at aligning the development of the making available right with the vast communications potential afforded by the Internet.

Moderation: Valentina Moscon

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

The recent upsurge of patent litigation cases initiated by patent assertion entities (PAEs) in the US has led to an intense debate about their effect on innovation dynamics and on the IP system functioning. We contribute to this debate by providing original evidence based on the patenting activity of PAEs in Europe, a region where the patent assertion landscape is growing rapidly and the imminent introduction of the Unified Patent Court and the Unitary Patent will upset the current schemes. Relying on European Patent Office data on patent transfers and patent citations in the high-tech sector, our results show that PAEs acquire patents with high average technological quality. They may thus increase liquidity in the patent market, enhancing efficiency in the capital market for inventions. However, after a transfer occurs, patents transferred to PAEs receive significantly fewer citations than never transferred patents. Interestingly, when we focus directly on transferred patents, we find that there is not significant difference in the after-transfer pattern of citations between patents transferred to PAEs and patents transferred to other entities. On the one hand, the overall evidence suggests that PAEs do not operate as patent intermediaries. On the other, however, also transfers to producing companies seem not to increase the efficiency of the market for technology, opening relevant questions about its entire functioning. These results are robust to different measures of citations considered and to different econometric techniques applied. (joint with Gianluca Orsatti)

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Advances in science and innovation are traditionally viewed as starting from a question or problem or challenge. We have a problem to solve, a question to answer, and we seek ways to address these. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that some of the most creative and revolutionary solutions and innovations arise by a different process, where solutions did not come by seeking to address a problem. For example, Velcro was invented by de Mestral following an experience with a plant burr that stuck to his clothing. Seeing the mechanism by which the burr clung to fabric suggested a new way to design fasteners. Both the need and the solution were novel to him at the time of his observation and insight. Recent work by von Hippel and von Krogh (2016) has argued that such discoveries may arise from a heretofore unstudied form of solution-finding. They proposed that such discoveries arise without the need for a priori problem-formulation. Instead, a chance observation or encounter prompts an insight that provides a solution which by its recognition identifies the need it satisfies simultaneously. They termed this kind of situation “a need-solution pair.” It will be argued that need-solution pair innovation may be a highly prevalent and creative form of solution-finding that emerges from the natural capacity of perceivers to apprehend (consciously or unconsciously) the functions of objects as part of the natural process of object recognition and understanding. Implications of this unstudied process for models of general solution-finding will be discussed and direction for further research and improved approaches to innovation be offered.

Contact Person: Fabian Gaessler

Moderation: Francisco Beneke

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room 313 

While data interoperability solutions will certainly consist on a combination of these three paths, the intended workshop focuses primarily on the role that both data standards and APIs play in achieving IoT data interoperability. By exchanging views with business, data and standardization experts in the IoT field, the workshop should provide us with the necessary technical and market knowledge to assess the economic, legal and regulatory implications of data standardization and the emerging “API economy”.

Each workshop will address the different kinds of standards which in the Institute’s view are relevant for the IoT. The focus of the second workshop will be the IoT data interoperability.

The workshop will be held at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. Participation is by invitation only.

See Program

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

We provide a practitioner's view on the economics of licensing standard-essential patents and related issues of standard development. Based on a presentation of the paper "Over-Declaration of Standard Essential Patents and Determinants of Essentiality", recent industry developments, contrast practical experiences, and the economic literature will be discussed, and potential topics for future research will be raised. Timo Ali-Vehmas, Nokia head of ecosystems research and former VP, compatibility and industry collaboration, will join for the presentation.

On this day, visitors can ask the researchers questions, can be explained what patent, trademark, copyright and antitrust law or innovation and entrepreneurship is, can live research in the laboratory experience, have a look at the impressive architecture of the house or visit the unique library.

Link to the program

Moderation: Daria Kim

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room 313 

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

Family background matters for entrepreneurship; however, the focus on factors making siblings similar rather than different may hide important sources of heterogeneity and understate the total importance of families. In a set of causal exercises using Swedish register data, I assess the differential effects of birth order, family size, and sibling sex composition on entrepreneurship. These factors appear to have a negligible impact. While later born men are more likely to become unincorporated entrepreneurs, this effect is largely explained by their lower education, pointing towards the subsistence nature of this type of entrepreneurship. I find no evidence of causal family size effects in linear and non-linear instrumental variable approaches, although there is a small negative effect of having a brother on the father-daughter association in unincorporated entrepreneurship. Finally, neither source of within-family heterogeneity exhibits a clear relationship with incorporated entrepreneurship. The results are consistent with the absence of adult sibling peer effects in entrepreneurship and confirm the role of families in generating sibling similarities, not differences. The importance of family background for entrepreneurship is therefore only marginally understated, and accounting for within-family differences increases previously estimated sibling correlations by little.

Contact Person: Laura Rosendahl Huber, Ph.D.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room E10

In its 2017 Lilly v Actavis decision, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom decided to alter the way in which questions of patent claim construction and infringement are dealt with under UK law. A doctrine of equivalents is back again in England. In this seminar Mr Justice Birss will seek to explain the implications of this decision and what may be some of the difficulties which the courts will have to grapple with as a result. A fundamental question relates to the interaction between validity and this new approach. Or to pose the question another way: is Lilly v Actavis a decision about claim scope in general or infringement in particular?

Dr. Klaus Bacher, Richter am Bundesgerichtshof, wird im Anschluss die Grundgedanken der Äquivalenzlehre in Deutschland aufzeigen und auf die Entwicklung der Rechtsprechung hierzulande eingehen.

Zur Erleichterung unserer Vorbereitungen bitten wir um Anmeldung bis Freitag, den 7. September 2018 per E-Mail an elisabeth.amler(at)ip.mpg.de