Compulsory Licensing of Patents

5 important questions on Compulsory Licensing of Patents

What is compulsory licensing?

Compulsory licensing allows firms in developing countries to produce foreign inventions without the consent of foreign patent owners

What important aspect of compulsory licensing have policy debates neglected?

Does compulsory licensing increase or discourage domestic invention in countries that licence foreign technologies?

When does compulsory licensing may discourage domestic invention?

If access to foreign inventions at below-market rate weakens incentives to develop alternative technologies domestically
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What could enable domestic firms to establish their own independent production?

The ability to produce foreign inventions
  • own independent production strengthens incentives to invest in complementary research and skills and creates opportunities for learning by doing

What are the main findings of Moser & Voena (2012): Compulsory Licensing of Patents? (5)

  • To measure the effects of compulsory licensing, this paper compares changes in annual patents for chemical inventions by domestic inventors across technologies that were differentially affected by the TWEA
  • This strategy allows us to control for alternative factors that may have encouraged domestic invention
    • such as improvements in education and scientific training
  • Technologies are measured at the level of narrowly-defined subclasses of United States Patent Office (USPTO) patents
  • Chemical inventions in some subclasses were affected by compulsory licensing
  • Specifically, subclasses are defined as treated if a domestic firm was issued a compulsory license for one of 699 enemy-owned chemical patents under the TWEA

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