Patents as an Incentive for Innovation

Edited by Rafal Sikorski & Zaneta Zemla-Pacud

Patents are a reward for human inventiveness. A well-functioning 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. This ground-breaking book is the first to deeply analyse how patent law today performs its function of stimulating innovation in the crucial sectors of healthcare, agriculture, artificial intelligence and communications technology.

Patent specialists, practitioners and scholars from various jurisdictions thoroughly describe how patent rights can be deployed to incentivize investments in researching and developing socially critical innovations without sacrificing the public’s interest in sharing the benefits that are produced. Among the emerging issues of patent rights investigated are the following:

• protectability and morality of according private rights over material 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 taken into consideration by the authors include protectability criteria, length and scope of the granted protection, mechanisms for dealing with the friction between generalized application and specialized concerns, and rights enforcement. These aspects are analysed on the domestic, international and global levels.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to strike the right balance between innovation and access in healthcare and other technologies, a need rooted in patent law. Because the problems discussed – and solutions offered – in this collection of expert essays are of tremendous practical and cultural significance, the book will be of immeasurable value to practitioners, policymakers and researchers in patent law and other fields of intellectual property law.