Author Description

Obstructions to patent enforcement exist all over the world. Increasingly, unauthorized players use protected inventions to conduct their own commercial businesses. The question must be asked whether available law provides for sufficient disincentives against the infringement of granted rights. If a patent right cannot be properly enforced, it is of little value to its owner; moreover, under-enforcement ultimately leads to tension within the entire system of protection, generating harmful repercussions and sooner or later producing dysfunctional effects. Yet protection that is too wide risks hindering further innovation. Carefully balancing the scope of legal protection with the impact of enforcement measures is essential. The more the legal focus has moved to questions of enforcement, the more the imbalance within the system of legal protection has been revealed. In 2010 an international conference was organized around these issues in Taipei by the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law and the Academia Sinica, Taipei, with the support of the IP Academy Singapore, the Institute of Law for Science and Technology of National Tsing Hua University, and the Graduate Institute of Intellectual Property, National Chengchi University. The aims were to provide doctrinal clarification of some common misconceptions and myths surrounding patent enforcement, and to discuss the “more economic approach,” which is gaining growing acceptance across many countries. This publication, derived from that conference, carries through those objectives, and also serves as a handbook for patent enforcement in major Asian jurisdictions, where there is huge potential for economic growth and patent cooperation. In addition it looks into the experiences of the centralized system of patent enforcement in the United States, and into the European Union’s efforts to establish a truly international patent right governed by a