PTC FORUM
The Online Journal of the Patent, Trademark and Copyright Research Foundation
Part Three: Research Papers
One of the main purposes of the online
journal published by the Patent, Trademark and Copyright Research Foundation is
to publish research papers. The first of these was on the subject of "The Exhaustion
of Trade Mark Rights in the European Union". The second research paper is entitled
"Biotechnology Patents and Startups"; it is the first of several in a series entitled
"On the Brink of the Third Industrial Revolution". The series is introduced in
the following observations by Dr Robert H Rines, Professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, responsible for the course
in Intellectual Property, Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship.
On the Brink of the Third Industrial Revolution: Studies on the Trends predating
Imminent Change in Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship
A Collection of graduate students' Research Reports in Course 6.981, Development
of Inventions and Creative Ideas (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Robert H Rines
(Andres Tellez, Teaching Assistant)
1999-2000
Introduction by Dr Rines
I have been watching the MIT graduate student interest in my course of lectures
on intellectual property, technology transfer and entrepreneurship swell over
the almost four decades of my teaching. Occasionally, one or two students each
year become sufficiently excited to put into practice what we have discussed and
to try their wings in starting a new enterprise; and, once in a while, when it
appeared proper and appropriate, I was requested to join in their pursuits, providing
counseling, intellectual property development services and serving on their boards
of directors. In this I reaped the rich, extra-curricular rewards, not only of
close friendships, but also of the extreme satisfaction of benefiting society
with new and powerful enterprises and sometimes benefiting myself and my charities,
two institutions which I had founded, the Academy of Applied Science and the Franklin
Pierce Law Center, and often our mutual alma mater, MIT.
While sensitive to the ethics underlying personal benefit from the use of my teaching
position and, of course, careful to steer students clear of even an appearance
of a conflict of interest with our institutions, I have become in more recent
years merely a charitable referral service to other outside professionals, particularly
since we have passed from the long prior era of venture capital disinterest in
the extreme risks of start-ups to the more recent and much more sanguine (greedy?)
era of today.
1 BIOTECHNOLOGY
PATENTS AND STARTUPS
by Orton Huang, Michael Lel, Peter Lu, Alon Mozes
2 EXHAUSTION OF INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION
by Arnaud Gasnier
3 THE GROWTH OF ASIAN E-COMMERCE:
SOCIOPOLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY TRENDS
By Karin Cheung, Hua Fung The, Erick Tseng, Adelaide Zhang