Software Patent Law Essay

There is just a one person who sells products or services and there are no incentives which help to break this monopoly. There are many monopoly industries in the market. In monopoly, they use patents because they don’t like if someone’s copy their inventions.

Patent: A government authority or license conferring a right or title for a set period, especially the sole right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention.

“The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO” (ALEXANDRIA 1).

Protection of intellectual property are investments based on acquired knowledge, thought and effort by one or multiple individuals on behalf of themselves, the business they work for when the property is created, and a financial investment. Each of these – acquired knowledge, thought, physical effort, financial investment – have a value that can be attached as it relates the usefulness or importance of the resulting product. That value will have a level of importance to the individual(s) creating the product and if applicable, the investor providing the funds in support of the creation.

Since 1996, the European Union's Trademark Regulation has allowed a single trademark registration enforceable in all members of the European Union.

Proponents of patent reform largely focus on the cost of patent infringement litigation to the U.S. economy and companies. While some argue that the type of patents issued should be limited in order to uphold the intent of Article I, Section 8, others claim that standards for issuing patents should be strengthened in order to reduce the number of costly patent infringement lawsuits. The cost of litigation and standards for issuing a patent is the focus of the proceeding text and justification for patent reform in the United States.

It is intended both to provide thumbnail descriptions of the various intellectual property regimes to economists working in this area and to indicate where additional economic research might be useful. The other papers in this symposium provide important examples of ongoing research on the economics of intellectual property. Suzanne Scotchmer analyzes the complex effects of patent protection when innovation is cumulative. Rather than analyzing situations in which several firms vie to develop the same innovation-the approach of the "patent race" literature-her analysis examines circumstances in which only one firm can develop an initial innovation but others can also build upon it. She focuses on how the incentive to develop both the initial and subsequent inventions may be affected by the scope of patent protection. Janusz Ordover considers ways of adjusting the patent system that may help to both provide returns to the inventor, and encourage the diffusion of the innovation in the economy. His paper is part of a line of work that explores the place of the intellectual property system among the large number of institutions that affect the amount and nature of research and development that takes place. In the final paper, David

Legally issued by governments so patented inventions can inspire others and offer advantages because they are available to everyone but all proprietorship rights are reserved.

These intellectual properties included patents and trademarks. Unfortunately, nations are still struggling to adopt a consistent international legal system that governs the intellectual property. They often have restrictions which includes geographical/and field use limitations and customer restriction. The Paris Convention is a guarantee that in each signatory country, foreign trademark and patent application from other signatory countries will receive the same treatment. According to United States Patent and Trademark Offices (2009) a patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor. There were problems and drawbacks with this particular agreement so in 1970 the patent cooperation Treaty was adopted. This particular agreement addresses the centralized utility patent application process (Schaffer, Agusti, & Earle, 2009). A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination of words, phrases, symbols or designs, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others United States Patent and Trademark (2009). Riordan Manufacturing makes plastic products in the United States and decided to move the plant that makes Pontiac products to China. This was a way to produce goods cheaper than in the United States and enter the market international. When making this move into the international market Riordan Manufacturing has trademarks on their plastic bottles and other plastic products

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, passed on September 16, 2011, was the most significant reform to the patent system in the United States since the Patent Act of 1952, which redefined the patentability of patent to include being nonobvious in addition to new and useful (1). The demanding need for patent reform had been discussed and debated frequently both within the literature focusing on patent trolls and consistently in Congress with the introduction of many patent reform acts that were never enacted: the Patent Reform Act of 2006 at the 109th Congress, the Patent Reform Act of 2007 at the 110th Congress, and the Patent Reform Act of 2009 at the 111th Congress (2-5). The enactment of the America Invents Act in 2011 after the failure of previous reform attempts signifies its importance in addressing the pressing issues of the United States patent system. The America Invents Acts specifically aimed to confront problems that were impeding innovation: the ever-increasing expense of the patent process, the exploitation of the patent system by patent trolls, and the unnecessary complexity and inefficiency of the patent process as a whole.

We live in a world where most humans act like sheep following the herd; most people would rather follow the crowd rather than think for themselves. From cheating on an exam to copying other people’s ideas, that seems to be the norm in our society: most people want the easy way out for everything, as thinking is actually hard to do. So for the very few people who do put effort into thinking and use their creativity to develop novel ideas and implement them through the commercialization of a product or service, they have to be rewarded so that all their effort, time, and money aren’t spent in vain.

The U.S. constitution gave Congress the power to “ promote the devellopment of the useful arts” by granting exclusive rights to inventers for a limited period of time. The purpose of a patent was to assurre the rights of the creators in exchange for not keeping these inventions secret, thus overall knowledge base grows.

A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, product or process that provides a new way of doing something, or that offers a new technical solution to a problem. An invention in general must fulfill certain criteria in order to be protected by a patent. For example, the Patents Act, 1970 in S. 2(1) (j) defines invention as a new product or process involving an inventive step and capable of industrial application. In other words, an invention in order to be patentable must show an element of novelty, must show “an inventive step”, and must be of practical use. Particularly, the Patents Act, 1970 defines “inventive step” as a feature of an invention that involves technical advance as compared to the existing knowledge or having economic significance or both and that makes the invention not obvious to a person skilled in the art. In other words, patent rights are not available for new advances that are merely obvious extensions or modifications of prior designs. Besides, the requirement of difference over prior art, there is a requirement to establish the extent of common general knowledge that exists while

Therefore, protection of patents is one of the key conditions necessary for further development of the pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, non-efficient legislation that does not provide the necessary level of patent protection is one of the factors that hamper expansion of “Big Pharmaceutical” companies to the developing countries8.

China’s patent system can be traced back to the late Qing Dynasty when China began signing international treaties. For example, on August 18, 1903, China and the United States agreed on a treaty on navigation and commerce. The treaty provided for a “reciprocal patent-granting arrangement whereby citizens of one contracting party could apply for and secure patent rights for their inventions in the other contracting party.”1 After the Qing Dynasty was over thrown in 1911, the