Designing Intellectual Property Law as a Tool for Development: Prospects and Challenges of the Ethiopian Patent Regime

Hailemeskel, Habtamu (2011) Designing Intellectual Property Law as a Tool for Development: Prospects and Challenges of the Ethiopian Patent Regime. Masters thesis, Addis Ababa University.

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Abstract

Intellectual property rights are believed to have an indirect role in facilitating the development efforts of a particular country by encouraging investment in inventions by establishing secured property system. The now advanced countries and the newly industrialized countries used to design their patent laws in tune with their technical and economic needs. They do so, for instance by weak intellectual property systems, by excluding sensitive technological fields from protection, by violating foreign rights, by using petty-patents and encouraging imitation, adaptation and reverse-engineering. However, means available during those times are blocked by harmonization of intellectual property rights through multilateral, regional and bilateral agreements. There are also ongoing harmonization efforts. The flexibilities for policy options are impoverished by these movements. Catching up efforts by technologically non-proficient or non-industrialized countries are becoming increasingly difficult. Their low technological capability demands them to tailor intellectual property system that helps technological knowledge develop within them by encouraging learning by doing and accumulation of knowledge. Compared to the historical, theoretical and empirical lessons, the current Ethiopian patent law, though its aim is to encourage local inventive activities, build national technological capability and transfer and adaptation of foreign technologies, crushes itself by employing standards that cannot be met by domestic enterprises even in cases of minor inventions. Ethiopia should, therefore, reform its patent law in a way that can contribute to its development efforts and enhance technical learning and accumulation of knowledge by domestic enterprises via increased exposure to foreign technologies.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Divisions:	Africana
Depositing User:	Kabiru Wallace Ndung'u
Date Deposited:	17 Jun 2019 13:20
Last Modified:	17 Jun 2019 13:20
URI:	http://thesisbank.jhia.ac.ke/id/eprint/9299

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