First Chief Economist of the USPTO appointed
[posted: 22-02-2010]
Prof. Stuart Graham, Ph.D. will become the first Chief Economist of the USPTO as of March 1st, 2010. Stuart Graham is well-known to EPIP members and conference participants from several presentations he gave at EPIP Annual Conferences. Stuart Graham holds doctoral degrees in law and in economics, and he has been an Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology since 2004. He has worked on topics such as licensing, the role of IP for startup firms, continuations and post-grant reviews

New publication
The Economics of Intellectual Property.  Suggestions for Further Research in Developing Countries and Countries with Economies in Transition
WIPO Publication Number: 1012
ISBN: 978-92-805-1791-0
Number of Pages: 216
Published in January 2009.
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New IPR website launched
[posted: 18-11-2008]
A group of legal scholars and economists from different universities in the world, including Harvard Law School, Hitotsubashi University, University of Helsinki and Mines ParisTech, have launched of a new online collaborative platform dedicated to standards, patents and antitrust.
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Report STOA Workshop: Policy options for the improvement of the European patent system
[posted: 30-07-2007]
The report has been written by a European and interdisciplinary working group in order to assess if the European patent system does adequately fulfil its purpose of stimulating innovation and diffusion of knowledge. The report progresses from the starting position that the European patent system may be operating in certain ways and within certain sectors in a way that improvements can be made.
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CCIA white paper, "Patent Policy for a Digital Economy".
The report addresses the problems experienced by the IT sector in the US, especially in software.  While the report supports legislative proposals generally favored by the IT sector, it stresses:

• the business consequences of making patents easy to get, more potent, easy to assert, and available for unlimited subject matter;
• the need for aggressive long-term reform to address abuses and the buildup of costs and risks in patent practice;
• the implicit cross-subsidy and backhanded industrial policy that results from a patent system that works much better in some sectors than in others;\
• the need to raise threshold standards of patent quality in the IT sector to reflect the economic reality of an intensely competitive, innovation-driven global economy; and
• the need for agreement on fundamental principles and for institutional reforms to guard against capture.
The report concludes with 9 recommendations that we believe are needed for genuine patent reform and that will contribute to broadening the debate over patent policy in the new Congress.