Search Results (10)

The artificial general intelligence (AGI) industry, represented by ChatGPT, has impacted social order during its development, and also brought various risks and challenges, such as ethical concerns in science and technology, attribution of liability, intellectual property monopolies, data security, and algorithm manipulation. The development of AI is currently facing a crisis of trust. Therefore, the governance of the AGI industry must be prioritized, and the opportunity for the implementation of the Interim Administrative Measures for Generative Artificial Intelligence Services should be taken. It is necessary to enhance the norms for the supervision and management of scientific and technological ethics within the framework of the rule of law. Additionally, it is also essential to continuously improve the regulatory system for liability, balance the dual values of fair competition and innovation encouragement, and strengthen data-security protection systems in the field of AI. All of these will enable coordinated governance across multiple domains, stakeholders, systems, and tools. Full article

Humanity faces numerous deeply interconnected systemic risks to sustainability—a global polycrisis. We need economic institutions that produce the knowledge required to address this polycrisis at the lowest cost, maximize the benefits that knowledge generates, and distribute those benefits fairly. Knowledge improves through use; its value is maximized when it is freely available. Intellectual property rights (IPRs), a form of monopoly, direct knowledge production towards market goods, raise the cost of doing research, and reduce the benefits by price-rationing access. Building on theories of the commons, the anticommons, and market failures, we propose the creation of a transnational green knowledge commons (TGKC) in which all knowledge that contributes to solving the polycrisis be made open access on the condition that any subsequent improvements also be open access. We argue that a TGKC is more sustainable, just, and efficient than restrictive IPRs and well suited to the motivations and governance institutions of public universities. We show how a single university could initiate the process and estimate that the cost would be more than offset by reduced IPR expenses. A TGKC would reduce the costs of generating and disseminating knowledge directed towards a sustainable future and help stimulate the transnational cooperation, reciprocity, and trust required for sustainable management of the global biophysical commons. Full article

The topic of public health is indispensable to talk about. It is essential to discuss new inventions, new and improved treatments, and their efficiencies with different combinations, but one thing that is important to remember is whether these inventions are available for those in need. Availability concerns are linked with affordability, as the affordability of a drug determines its consumption; furthermore, affordability can lead to overconsumption. The Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement provides flexibility to control the misuse of patent monopolies. The object of this research is twofold: one is to investigate whether and how Pakistan incorporates TRIPS flexibilities in its national patent legislation, and the second is to find out the reason for unaffordable cancer treatment in Pakistan. This research highlights that the use of TRIPS flexibilities in Pakistan will help the state authorities to provide better health facilities to the public generally as well as particularly in cancer cases, as cancer treatment in Pakistan is unaffordable. The methodology applied for this research is primarily comparative and bears the qualitative aspect of the issue. This research concludes that Pakistan’s legal system fails to incorporate effective legal provisions related to TRIPS flexibilities, and it also highlights that the ever-greening of patents results in the high prices of cancer medicines in Pakistan. This research further recommended that there is a dire need to incorporate and use TRIPS flexibilities in the country to control the high prices of cancer treatment and cancer mortality rate in the country. Full article

Open-source 3-D printing has played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the additive manufacturing (AM) landscape by making distributed manufacturing economic, democratizing access, and fostering far more rapid innovation than antiquated proprietary systems. Unfortunately, some 3-D printing manufacturing companies began deviating from open-source principles and violating licenses for the detriment of the community. To determine if a pattern has emerged of companies patenting clearly open-source innovations, this study presents three case studies from the three primary regions of open-source 3-D printing development (EU, U.S., and China) as well as three aspects of 3-D printing technology (AM materials, an open-source 3-D printer, and core open-source 3-D printing concepts used in most 3-D printers). The results of this review have shown that non-inventing entities, called patent parasites, are patenting open-source inventions already well-established in the open-source community and, in the most egregious cases, commercialized by one (or several) firm(s) at the time of the patent filing. Patent parasites are able to patent open-source innovations by using a different language, vague patent titles, and broad claims that encompass enormous swaths of widely diffused open-source innovation space. This practice poses a severe threat to innovation, and several approaches to irradicate the threat are discussed. Full article

The aim of this research is to investigate the impact of intellectual property rights (IPR) on green technological innovation in China. The study utilizes a mixed-method approach, combining both qualitative and quantitative methods, to provide empirical evidence on the subject matter. According to the findings, IPR protection may have a favorable impact on the green technological innovation (GTI) of firms. According to mechanism testing, the channels by which IPR protection influences businesses’ GTI are research and development (R&D) input and foreign investment entry, whereas the human capital and finance capability of firms can favorably moderate the link between IPR protection and GTI. According to heterogeneity tests, private firms, exporting firms, and firms in industries with a high degree of monopoly are more notable for their promotional effect of IPR protection on the GTI of firms. Full article

Governed through the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) since 1995, the current medical R&D system requires significant trade-offs between innovation and high monopoly prices for patented drugs that restrict patient access to medicines. Since its implementation, few amendments have been made to the original TRIPS agreement to allow low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to facilitate access by generic manufacturers through flexible provisions, such as compulsory licensing and parallel import. Although a useful policy tool in theory, the routine use of TRIPS flexibilities in LMICs in the procurement of new essential medicines (EMs) is regarded as a ‘last resort’ due to strong political response in high-income countries (HICs) and new trade agreements’ restrictions. In this context, access-oriented biomedical Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have emerged. More recently, leading multilateral health organizations have recommended different types of intellectual property (IP) interventions, voluntary biomedical patent pools, as strategies to reduce prices and increase the diffusion of novel EMs in LMICs. Nevertheless, the recent Ebola and COVID-19 outbreaks highlight growing concerns regarding the use of TRIPS flexibilities and the limited success of voluntary mechanisms in promoting access to medicines in the Global South amidst health crises. This review aims at describing the state-of-the-art empirical research on IP-related options and voluntary mechanisms applied by emerging PPPs to guarantee timely and affordable access to EM in LMICs and reflect on both models as access paradigms. Some suggestions are put forward for future research paths on the basis of these analyses and in response to contemporary debates on waiving key IP rights on COVID-19 therapies, diagnostics, and vaccines. Full article

Digital regulation implies the quantified measuring and the network infrastructure allowing managers to control the processes of value creation. Digital regulation needs to take into account tacit elements of the value creation process, including unconscious competency, creativity, and intuitive anticipation, to assure the resulting network’s innovation growth. Digital society in developing countries is built on the ground of fact change of the economy and social relations, of transition towards an emerging market within the global offline network of interactions and online activities through Internet; the innovative growth imposes the evolution of managerial behavior and attitudes. The main objective of the paper is to obtain indications on the perception of intellectual capital by corporate managers. The exploratory study was carried out in Russian companies operating in different sectors, with the use of the open-ended approach, including focused interviews and group discussion among experts, middle and senior managers from marketing or corporate governance background. The data were complemented by documentary analysis of descriptions of internal processes of the implementation of digital tools of accounting, which includes the human resources control applied for the remote work during the pandemic. Networking helps to coordinate functions between team members at remote work and between teams and administrators. The interviews demonstrated the administrative tendency to under-estimate the non-formalized factors of innovation activity, such as awareness of corporate strategy, creativity, motivation, and affective and behavioral components of communication of the persons involved in the enrichment of intellectual capital. The results show fuzzy boundaries between the intellectual capital components that are difficult to control. This difficulty provokes the preference for the use of “traditional” quantitative indicators that had been implemented at the stage of the financial digitalization, instead of developing new parameters or measuring approaches. The networking emerges synergetic effect if the administrators refuse their monopoly on the uncertainty zones and are oriented to construct the trustful atmosphere of personal responsibility within the network. Full article

As a growing number of companies reject intellectual property (IP) monopoly-based business models to embrace libre product development of free and open source hardware and software, there is an urgent need to refurbish the instruments of university-corporate research partnerships. These partnerships generally use a proprietary standard research agreement (PSRA), which for historical reasons contains significant IP monopoly language and restrictions for both the company and the university. Such standard research agreements thus create an artificial barrier to innovation as both companies using a libre model and universities they wish to collaborate with must invest significantly to restructure the contracts. To solve this problem, this article provides a new Sponsored Libre Research Agreement (SLRA). The differences between the agreements are detailed. The advantages of using an SLRA are provided for any type of company and include: (1) minimizing research investments on reporting requirements; (2) reducing delays related to confidentiality and publication embargos; and (3) reducing both transaction and legal costs as well as research time losses associated with IP. Moving to libre agreements both speeds up and reduces costs for setting up collaborative research. Under the SLRA, university researchers can spend more time innovating for the same investment. Full article

As a kind of thinking mechanism that grasps motion, change and development of objects on the whole, systematic thinking contains a whole set of thinking principles, methods and operation procedures. With the uprising popularity of studies on informational system science and complexity theory, information reveals a new field that the philosophy of the past has not discovered. Wu’s works are putting forward a wholly new scientific thinking way: the Informational Thinking. We can conclude rationally from Wu’s explanations of information that the character of informational thinking way can include and surpass the basic idea of systematic thinking way. So far as the whole process of scientific cognition is concerned, functions of informational thinking are expanded in several aspects. Information civilization is undoubtedly the latest pattern of contemporary human civilization. Nowadays, people are hard to escape the fate of survival of informatization. Its theory and practice are fundamentally reforming and impressively reconstructing existence style of modern society, as well as the modern individual life belief, emotion, behavior, attitude and psychology in every respect. The reconstruction of modern information ecological ethics must face to face with the openness of information culture, non-controllability, freedom, permeability, internationalism, technicality, virtuality, popularity, diversity and immediacy due to the rapid development of information technology and deal with the severe challenges to social management as a result of the tendency of the disordering of network culture, non-controllability, anarchy and liberalization 7. Taking Control of the Optimal Systematic Condition of Objects as the Aim. The modern sense of information ecology refers to a system which is combined by man, practice, value and technology existing in a specific regional environment, which plays a role of educated existence in the integrated system. With the continuing expansion and penetrating of informatization, the spiritual and cultural life of modern society is confronted with the severe challenges of complanation, homogeneity, non-privacy or even alienation and so on. At the same time, it leads to a series of social ethical issues, such as infringement of intellectual property rights, illegal access to information, the illegal use of information technology, information attribution of liability, authorization, infringement of personal right of privacy, infringement of image rights, etc. The emergence of these problems is rooted in information ecological imbalance (It refers to the disequilibrium state among information, human and environment), that is to say, there are information exchange blocks between the internal and external ecological system or imbalance between its elements and subsystems. Information ecological imbalance mainly reflects in the following five aspects: excessive information, information monopoly, information infringing, information pollution and the information syndrome. The root cause of ecological imbalance lies in its entropy. In this increasingly informationized and intelligentized era, “the means of technology” in the sense of pure knowledge is undoubtedly important and indispensable with regard to alleviating the encroachment on information subjects brought by excessive and detrimental information substantially. However, in terms of modern sociology of knowledge, it is more important to pay a close attention to the autonomous construction and normative function of the culture, values and ethics beyond pure knowledge, to keep in mind “the balance of information ecology”, the core value subject of information practice and information culture, to abide by the law of information production, information transmission, information consumption and information disintegration with an aim to ensure the reasonable match of the categories and numbers of information subjects, the coordination of the factors of information ecological environment, the adjustment of information subjects and information ecological environment and the efficient circulation of the whole information system. Thus, the premium practice-value reconstruction of modern information ecological ethics must be based on the diversity and differentiation of information ecology and the principle of coordination, mutual benefits and symbiosis with the aspiration of promoting the coordinated development between human society and information environment. The reconstruction should strive to create a harmonious and open environment to produce information and share information in a fair and just way, to configure and foster more sharing information resources reasonably, to realize the balance of information ecological system and ultimately to promote the sustainable and healthy development of humans, information environment and even the material and spiritual life of human society. Full article

Modernity does not possess a monopoly on mass incarceration, population fears, forced migration, famine, or climatic change. Indeed, contemporary and early modern concerns over these matters have extended interests in Thomas Malthus. Yet, despite extensive research on population issues, little work explicates the genesis of population knowledge production or how the process of intellectual transfer occurred during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper examines the Delessert network’s instrumental role in cultivating, curating, and circulating knowledge that popularized Malthusian population theory, including the theory’s constitutive elements of political economy, philanthropy, industry, agriculture, and botany. I show how deviant, nonconformist groups suffered forced migration for their political philosophy, particularly during the revolutionary 1790s, resulting in their imprisonment and migration to America. A consequence of these social shifts was the diffusion and dissemination of population theory—as a pursuit of scientific knowledge and exploration—across both sides of the Atlantic. By focusing on the Delesserts and their social network, I find that a byproduct of inter and intra continental migration among European elites was a knowledge exchange that stimulated Malthus’s thesis on population and Genevan Augustin Pyramus Candolle’s research on botany, ultimately culminating in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and human evolution. Full article