The Global Governance of Knowledge: Patent Offices and their Clients
Cambridge University Press, 1/28/2010
EAN 9780521195669, ISBN10: 0521195667
Hardcover, 368 pages, 23.6 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Patent offices around the world have granted millions of patents to multinational companies. Patent offices are rarely studied and yet they are crucial agents in the global knowledge economy. Based on a study of forty-five rich and poor countries that takes in the world's largest and smallest offices, Peter Drahos argues that patent offices have become part of a globally integrated private governance network, which serves the interests of multinational companies, and that the Trilateral Offices of Europe, the USA and Japan make developing country patent offices part of the network through the strategic fostering of technocratic trust. By analysing the obligations of patent offices under the patent social contract and drawing on a theory of nodal governance, the author proposes innovative approaches to patent office administration that would allow developed and developing countries to recapture the public spirit of the patent social contract.
1. Patent offices and the global governance of knowledge
2. Labyrinths and catacombs
patent office procedure
3. The rise of patent offices
4. The sun and its planets – the European Patent Office and National Offices
5. The USPTO and JPO
6. The age of trilaterals and the spirit of co-operation
7. The jewel in the crown – India's Patent Office
8. The dragon and the tiger
China and South Korea
9. Joining the patent office conga line
Brazil
10. Islands and regions in the patent stream
11. Reclaiming the patent social contract
12. Patent administration sovereignty – nodal solutions for small countries, developing countries.
'Professor Peter Drahos, one of the most influential scholars in the area of intellectual property rights, explores in this book a subject largely ignored by the existing literature. His interdisciplinary study unveils how patent offices actually work in about 20 countries, and how they contribute to make up the global patent system. Based on a solid theoretical framework and on a vast and rigorous empirical research, Drahos makes an outstanding contribution to the understanding of international governance and regulation in this area of crucial importance for developed and developing countries alike.' Carlos M. Correa, Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies on Industrial Property and Economics Law, at the University of Buenos Aires