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In the long term, the main pillar in China’s move towards self-reliance is the creation of an innovation infrastructure which is “active in creating, leading, and defining international technological standards.” A country’s innovation performance is inextricably tied to the underlying innovation infrastructure, which includes components such as higher education of technical workforce, tax treatment of R&D activities, access to venture capital, and industry/university/government partnerships. Having such an ecosystem would allow China to “free itself from dependency on foreign technology and develop indigenous, high-tech capabilities that satisfy its lucrative domestic market and serve and strengthen its military.”

It is accepted that the United States is the world’s innovation leader, but this position is not unassailable. The last few decades have seen China repeatedly increasing their assault for the top spot. ‘Made in China 2025’ and its immediate predecessor, the ‘National Medium and Long-Term Plan for Science and Technology (2006-2020)’ are the latest policies designed to move China toward the goal of technological leadership. Under these ambitious national policies, China has undertaken a broad range of initiatives with the aim of strengthening innovation infrastructure.

“My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan wrote in a January memo to officers in the Air Mobility Command. The memo, which promptly leaked to reporters, warned that the United States and China were barreling toward a conflict over Taiwan. The U.S. Defense Department quickly distanced itself from Minihan’s blunt assessment. Yet the general wasn’t saying anything in private that military and civilian officials weren’t already saying in public. In August 2022, a visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had set off the worst cross-strait crisis in a quarter century. China’s aircraft barreled across the center line of the Taiwan Strait; its ships prowled the waters around the island; its ballistic missiles splashed down in vital shipping lanes. Months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had reminded everyone that major war is not an anachronism, the Taiwan crisis made visceral the prospect that a Chinese attack on that island could trigger conflict between the world’s two top powers. Washington certainly took note. A year earlier, the outgoing chief of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip Davidson, had predicted that a war in the Taiwan Strait could come by 2027. After the August crisis, this “Davidson window” became something like conventional wisdom, with Minihan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other U.S. officials predicting that trouble might start even sooner. If the United States and China do clash over Taiwan, it will be the war everyone saw coming—which would make the failure to deter it all the more painful. To be sure, U.S. President Joe Biden has made deterring that conflict a priority. Despite the long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity,” Biden has publicly affirmed, four times, that the United States would come to Taiwan’s aid if it were attacked. Yet deterrence is about more than declaratory policy: It requires assembling a larger structure of constraints that preserve the peace by instilling fear of the outcome and consequences of war. More than a year after the August crisis and nearly three years into the Davidson window, the United States and its friends are struggling to build that structure in the limited time they may have left. Taiwan is important in many ways—as a critical node in technology supply chains, as a democracy menaced by an aggressive autocracy, as an unresolved legacy of China’s civil war. Yet Taiwan has become the world’s most perilous flash point mostly for strategic reasons. Taiwan is a “lock around the neck of a great dragon,” as Chinese military analyst Zhu Tingchang has written. It anchors the first island chain, the string of U.S. allies and partners that block China from the open Pacific. If China were to take Taiwan, it would rupture this defense perimeter, opening the way to greater influence—and coercion—throughout the region and beyond. In 1972, Chinese leader Mao Zedong told U.S. President Richard Nixon that Beijing could wait 100 years to reclaim Taiwan. China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, is not so patient. He has said the island’s awkward status cannot be passed from generation to generation; he has reportedly ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for action by 2027. Militaries constantly prepare for missions they never execute, of course. But the risk of war is rising as China’s capabilities—and urgency—grow.

A great-power war over Taiwan would be cataclysmic. It would feature combat more vicious than anything the United States has experienced in generations.

In 2007, China succeeded in an anti-satellite (ASAT) test that alerted the U.S. about the broad vulnerability of its satellites. Since then, the Pentagon has focused on developing resilient solutions to space threats of the 2030s and beyond, while neglecting the rendezvous spacecraft threat that could result in a Space Pearl Harbor in the 2020s. This article proposes a strategy for the Pentagon to improve its current public discourse for deterring this catastrophic attack. In 2008, China started testing dual-use spacecraft capable of rendezvous and proximity operations. By January 2022, Beijing had successfully docked a rendezvous spacecraft with its own dead satellite in a geosynchronous orbit and maneuvered it to a higher orbit, less than two years behind the U.S. doing the same. The combination of China’s rendezvous and robotic advances and rapid small-satellite manufacturing capability could yield about 200 rendezvous spacecraft capable of forcibly docking and disabling U.S. critical satellites as early as 2026; this army of agile spacecraft is well suited to serve as a “shock and awe” precursor to its military campaign to seize Taiwan. Back in 2001, the Rumsfeld Commission issued a prescient warning: “Whether the U.S. will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce U.S. space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people—a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’—will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.” Now that such an attack could turn the free world into a hellscape under the thumb of an authoritarian regime in a few years how well has the Pentagon assured the U.S. public, as well as the international public, that the U.S. will have the capability in time to deter and defend against this fateful assault?

The United States’ intelligence community has reported that China is readying its military to potentially invade Taiwan by 2027. But a top Space Force official said his service is not moving fast enough to deter, and possibly defend against, attacks on U.S. space-based assets that would play a role in such a conflict. “There’s good progress, but I don’t think any of us are satisfied that what we have resourced and fielded — either in our guardians themselves or in the capabilities that we’re given them — is adequate to the task,” Maj. Gen. David Miller Jr., director of operations at the Space Force, said Monday during a webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute. The Defense Department believes space will likely be a warfighting domain in any future conflict, and that counterspace weapons would pose a significant threat to the Pentagon’s on-orbit assets used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), communications, positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), and other critical missions. In particular, a 2022 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency highlighted that China has developed capabilities that could damage satellites, including powerful ground-based laser weapons and missiles. Miller also pointed to China’s tests of a fractional orbital bombardment system carrying a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle as a testament to the militarization of the space domain. If executed correctly, the weapon would fly into space in low-Earth orbit before reentering the atmosphere to attack its target “Frankly, the difficulty in countering a threat like that and the potential risks associated with that — I think that opened a lot of people’s eyes,” he said. The Space Force is currently at a critical transformational point since its establishment in 2019, according to Miller. Whereas the service’s first three years were about establishing the Space Force’s foundation, now it is focused on becoming a “warfighting Space Force,” he said. “There’s been a significant change in the narrative and a significant change in the resourcing in the Space Force just over the last three years,” Miller said. “I think we’re on the right track to get there, but we’ve got to move in a few key areas in particular. And I think these next two years will be significantly consequential in telling us if we’re going to get there or not.” While the service has been forthcoming about some of its data collection and defensive capabilities, it’s been relatively tight-lipped about its own offensive counterspace capabilities. During a Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee in April, Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told lawmakers that he expected the Space Force to have an on-orbit capability that would enable the service to “compete in full-spectrum operations.” When asked what Space Force needs in order to give options to leaders in the event of an attack on U.S. space-based assets, Miller pointed to three tenets in Saltzman’s three-part “Competitive Endurance” framework to deter and defeat aggression. The tenets focus on bolstering the service’s space domain awareness and resilience, as well as engaging in responsible counterspace activities. “We have to get about the process and the prospects of — from multiple domains, not just the space domain — providing capability to find, fix and deny any adversary capability to find and target U.S. forces or allied forces,” Miller said. “That is something that in this transition … from legacy architecture to a warfighting force, that is where the nation is expecting us to go.”

With broad, bipartisan support from Congress, the Biden administration is expected to commence an all-of-government effort to confront the profound and rapidly multiplying challenges presented by China’s rise. Exactly what the program will entail remains unclear, but neutralizing Beijing’s web of predatory technology policies should be a priority. For many years, China has been funneling hundreds of billions of dollars annually into technology research, development and production. It has been underwriting technology theft on a grand scale. And it has been extorting technological knowhow and other assets from U.S. businesses, as the price of entry into the Chinese market. These practices have made a mockery of the rules-based international trading system and have subverted the proper functioning of markets. But what compels a firm and committed policy response from Biden is that Beijing’s pursuit of technological supremacy presents an intolerable threat to U.S. security. The U.S. government restricts the export of fissile materials as a matter of national security. Lockheed Martin is prohibited from selling F‑35 fighter jets to China. Advanced technology is essential to national defense, and in the wrong hands, could be used against Americans—to spy, extort, sabotage and conduct warfare. Technology is already employed in the service of repression in China and there is a clear case for restricting its flow. Economic protectionism is never a solution. But no less sacred than the rights of individuals to exchange freely the fruits of their labor is the obligation of government to protect its citizens from threats foreign and domestic. The obligation to conceive and execute appropriate measures to restrict the flow of technology has been summoned by Beijing’s technological predation. Tightening export controls, expanding the list of entities with which U.S. companies are prohibited from transacting, instituting investment restrictions and sealing off other conduits for theft of intellectual property are among the ways the Trump administration tried to keep cutting edge U.S. technology—and the advantages it bestows—out of the wrong hands. More recently, Congress began to appropriate funding for semiconductor research and development, as well as for export finance agencies to influence the sourcing of technology in communications infrastructure abroad. The case for prudence is obvious, but the measures that have been taken are not optimal or especially effective. Overly broad restrictions can become exceedingly costly without even purchasing any security. Restrictions on exports of U.S. technology that is available from other countries buys no security and at great expense to U.S. suppliers. Haphazard subsidies are distortionary and a recipe for waste and abuse. Surely, security measures can be made more surgical, less distortionary and more effective. They can be debated, transparently, among experts. They can be subject to cost-benefit analyses. And they can be designed and implemented to minimize collateral damage and encourage the support and cooperation of allies. This is the task before the Biden administration. In fairness, it’s hard to fault Beijing for its technology power play. After all, what government wouldn’t pursue technological preeminence if it were considered realistic and essential to national security? Being king of the technological hill confers all sorts of strategic advantages—commercial, cybersecurity, intelligence and military—including, perhaps most importantly, a head start in the race to develop the next generation of technology. For the same reasons, Washington shouldn’t be faulted for trying to thwart Beijing’s progress. Staying ahead of China in the technology race—or getting ahead as the case may be with respect to 5G—is simply a U.S. national security imperative and must be treated as such. Primacy in the next generation of technology could lock in advantages with very serious security implications for years and decades to come. Preeminence in space technology, for example, may be necessary to protect and ensure the operability of satellite systems, which enable global communications, weapons guidance and electronic warfare capabilities. The capacity to deter aggression may be lost without that edge. Today’s technology race shares similarities with yesterday’s arms race. Imagine how different the world would be if Nazi scientists had beaten us developing the atomic bomb. This is about Americans’ expectations of security. It’s about U.S. policymakers doing what is necessary to preserve and augment advantages that contribute to the strength and security of the United States. It’s about the responsibility of the U.S. government to protect its citizens and not foolishly squander the advantages the United States has accumulated over the years through diligence, determination and dumb luck. Yet, some favor inaction. They suggest the threat is exaggerated or that most U.S. restrictions will be ineffective and will only hasten China’s pursuit of self-sufficiency. Better to turn the other cheek. Besides, they rationalize, China will be too preoccupied with its own demographic and economic problems to present any real threat to the United States. Maybe. Differences of opinion are crucial to crafting the right policies, but it would be a dereliction of duty of the greatest magnitude if the U.S. government—presiding over the richest, most powerful country in history—failed to muster the wherewithal to at least try to secure essential U.S. technological advantages and protect the U.S. position because it didn’t take the threat seriously or appreciate the implications of ceding leadership. Like a successful business that spends to reinforce its incumbent advantages, the United States must reinvest to protect its strategic advantages. Think of it as an insurance policy. Managing the U.S.-China relationship will be a monumental task for Biden and his successors. It will require adjusting expectations and behavior to the realities of a changing power balance. It will require humility, compromise and deft diplomacy. But it will also require the strength to stand down China’s technological predation and the security threat it represents.

The U.S. military has long held a key advantage over China's: it can hit mobile targets at extremely long distances. But that “monopoly is over,” the Space Force’s intel chief said Thursday. China is building a massive architecture of remote-sensing satellites to help target U.S. forces if they move to defend Taiwan in a conflict, said Maj. Gen. Greg Gagnon, deputy chief of space operations for intelligence. “It’s to provide indications and warnings of sailors, Marines, airmen, trying to move west, if directed, to defend freedom. They will now—in a way that we’re not comfortable talking about in America—they will be inside a rapidly expanding weapons engagement zone,” Gagnon said Thursday at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. China has launched more than 400 satellites over the past two years, more than half of which are designed to track things on Earth, Gagnon said. These are “remote-sensing satellites that are purpose-built to survey and do reconnaissance in the Western Pacific and globally. Satellites that are designed with a proliferated architecture, with many numbers, so that they are resilient against attack. An architecture that isn’t designed for efficiency and cost effectiveness, an architecture that’s designed to go to war and sustain in war. And the purpose of reconnaissance and surveillance, from the ultimate high ground, is of course to inform decisions about fire control for militaries,” he said. Since the inception of China’s military space arm in 2015, the country has seen an 550 percent increase in on-orbit assets, Gagnon said. “The PLA has rapidly advanced in space in a way that few people can appreciate,” Gagnon said. Gagnon also discussed Chinese surveillance capability in geosynchronous orbit, an orbit further out in space where satellites generally hover over the same part of Earth. China launched the world’s first—and so far only—GEO satellite with a synthetic-aperture radar payload into space last year, called Ludi Tance-4 (Land Exploration-4 in English). The advantage of this kind of radar in GEO is that it provides constant coverage and imagery, even through clouds and during night hours. China has said the satellite is for purely civilian purposes—a claim Gagnon refutes. “They recently put a radar imager in GEO in August. It’s designed to look at the Western Pacific, even though they say it’s about agriculture. The Western Pacific that it’s looking at is over the ocean. We kind of know what the purpose is,” Gagnon said.

In the DOJ statement on Zheng, the FBI's Alan Kohler Jr said China was targeting "American ingenuity" and seeking to "topple our status" as global leader. Zheng was an engineer specialising in turbine sealing technology and worked on various leakage containment technologies in steam turbine engineering. Such seals optimise turbine performance "whether by increasing power or efficiency or extending the usable life of the engine", the DOJ said. Gas turbines that power aircraft are central to the development of China's aviation industry. Aerospace and aviation equipment are among 10 sectors that the Chinese authorities are targeting for rapid development to reduce the country's dependence on foreign technology and eventually surpass it. But Chinese industrial espionage is targeting a wide range of other sectors too. According to Ray Wang, founder and CEO of Silicon Valley-based consultancy Constellation Research, they include pharmaceutical development and nanotechnology - engineering and technology conducted at the nanoscale for use in areas such as medicine, textiles and fabrics and automobiles. A nanometre is a billionth of a meter. It also includes pharmaceuticals, bioengineering - mimicking biological processes for purposes such as the development of biocompatible prostheses and regenerative tissue growth. Mr Wang cited an anecdote by a former head of research and development for a Fortune 100 company, who told him that "the person he entrusted the most" - someone so close that their children grew up together - was eventually found to be on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party. "He kindly explained to me that the spies are everywhere," he said. In the past industrial espionage from countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore was a concern, Mr Marro said. However once indigenous firms emerge as innovative market leaders in their own right - and so start to want to protect their own intellectual property - then their governments start passing legislation to take the issue more seriously. "As Chinese firms have become more innovative over the past decade, we've seen a marked strengthening of domestic intellectual property rights protection in tandem," Mr Marro said. There have been attempts to rein in hacking specifically. In 2015 the US and China struck a deal in which both sides pledged not to carry out "cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage". By the following year, the US National Security Agency had accused the Chinese of violating the agreement, although it did acknowledge that the quantity of attempts to hack government and corporate data had dropped "dramatically". But observers say the deal's overall impact has been minimal. Mr Wang said it was a "joke" due to a lack of enforcement. Chinese cyber-espionage in the US has been "pervasive" and extends to academic labs. "It has been going on in every aspect of Western businesses," he told the BBC. However Lim Tai Wei from the National University of Singapore noted that there were no "definitive uncontested studies" on the extent of the phenomenon. "Some believe that there was a short dip in Chinese cyber espionage against the US, but resumed its former level thereafter. Others believe it failed due to the overall breakdown in US-China relations," he said. Meanwhile the US is now directly trying to block China's progress in the key semiconductor industry - vital for everything from smartphones to weapons of war - saying China's use of the technology poses a national security threat. In October, Washington announced some of the broadest export controls yet, requiring licences for companies exporting chips to China using US tools or software, no matter where they are made in the world. Washington's measures also prevent US citizens and green card holders from working for certain Chinese chip companies. Green card holders are US permanent residents who have the right to work in the country. The US is beating China in the battle for chips Mr Marro says that while these measures will slow China's technological advance, they will also accelerate China's efforts to remove US and other foreign products from its tech supply chains. "China has been trying to do this for years, with muted success, but these policy goals now command greater urgency as a result of the recent US controls," he said. With China also invoking its own national security, the scramble for a technological edge between the world's two biggest economies is only likely to intensify further. But Mr Wang reckons that the US still holds the advantage. "My cyber-security friends tell me when they hack Chinese sites, the only worthwhile tech [they can find there] is US intellectual property," he said.

The House of Representatives recently formed a bipartisan select committee to “investigate and submit policy recommendations” on ways to counter the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The move is welcome — and long overdue. For decades, China has sought to weaken America, and enrich itself, by stealing cutting-edge technologies critical to our national security and economic well-being. Lawmakers would be wise to make this intellectual property theft the foundation of their investigation. Consider China’s ongoing campaign to appropriate U.S. companies’ trade secrets — the proprietary know-how that enables American firms to make everything from lifesaving medicines to next-generation alloys used in spacecraft. U.S. officials have estimated that China steals up to $600 billion of American intellectual property annually. This theft endangers the jobs of more than 45 million Americans who work in IP-intensive industries, which account for more than $6.5 trillion in economic output. China sometimes tries to obtain this intellectual property through bullying — essentially, requiring American companies that want to sell their goods to the Middle Kingdom’s 1.4 billion consumers to partner with Chinese firms. For example, until last year, China mandated that foreign car companies partner with local auto manufacturers. China has required wind turbine and solar panel producers to make a certain percentage of their products in the country. Those local “partners” frequently use this access to sensitive information to learn American secrets and, eventually, reproduce the technology without any need for a U.S. partner. Other times, Chinese nationals — often working formally or informally for the CCP — have outright pilfered trade secrets. In November 2022, a U.S. court sentenced Chinese national Xu Yanjun to 20 years in prison for planning to steal trade secrets from multiple U.S. aeronautical companies. In 2018, Chinese company Sinovel Wind Group was convicted in a Wisconsin federal court for stealing technology from its American partner. A recent report by Boston company Cybereason revealed a Chinese campaign called “Operation CuckooBees” that stole the blueprints for hundreds of gigabytes of advanced technology.  Unfortunately, this espionage campaign has borne fruit. According to experts at Harvard’s Kennedy School, China is on track to overtake the United States’ technological dominance within the next decade. And the CCP shows no signs of abandoning its goals. Just the opposite. President Xi has been elevating “technocrats” specializing in science and technology to positions of authority. In fact, nearly 40 percent of China’s national policy-making body is now composed of technocrats determined to accelerate their nation’s economic progress — by hook or by crook. For decades, China has sought to surpass the United States in high-tech fields by stealing Americans’ best ideas. It’s up to Congress to put a stop to this theft.

What went wrong? In a nutshell, U.S. patent protections have greatly weakened in the new millennium. The primary culprits are federal judges, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court.

For example, in several high-profile cases involving human health, the high court shrank the pool of inventions eligible for patenting.

While each study makes important contributions in assessing the strength of IPR protection in countries, several conceptual and measurement issues are raised. The first conceptual issue is which IPR laws must be examined to gauge protection. Rapp and Rozek's measure assumes patent laws are ipso facto IPR laws. However, services increasingly are accounting for larger portions of economic growth. The value of a name or identification therefore has significant economic impact. Particularly in western countries, the economic contributions of copyrighted software production, entertainment products, and publishing are significant. To discount these two forms of IP protection would be to underestimate their economic impact. Similarly, it has been argued elsewhere (Ostergard 1999; Hettinger 1989) that nations do not treat all IP equally. Some forms of IP are more important to nations' economies than others. Using patents as a proxy for all IPR may overlook this issue. While Seyoum measures the strength of these laws individually, Sherwood's measure blends five different forms of IPR laws into the measure. As I noted earlier, the combining of various laws into one conceptual measure of IPR protection may present some theoretical and methodological difficulty.

A second conceptual issue relates to the enforcement of the laws. Rapp and Rozek and Seyoum do not include a component for enforcement in their study, though Rapp and Rozek recognize the issue (1990a, 7). The logic behind this proposition is intuitively simple. Nations may have in place the institutional structures and financial resources to enforce these laws, but others that do not have these structures and resources may not be able to enforce the laws adequately. Sherwood too recognizes this issue by including an enforceability component in his measure, but it does not significantly address the behavior of the governing regime in enforcing the intellectual property laws. The enforcement component Sherwood uses reflects an assessment of the potential to enforce IPR laws and not an assessment of the regime's actual performance.

As does its federal counterpart, Mil. R. Evid. 201 authorizes judicial notice of "adjudicative facts" which are defined as "simply the facts of the particular case." See Drafters' [**9] Analysis at A22-4. Domestic law can constitute an adjudicative fact and be eligible for judicial notice if it is a "fact that is of consequence to the determination" of the case.3

[BEGIN FOOTNOTE 3] "Domestic law" includes treaties of the United States; executive agreements between the United States and any State, foreign country or international organization; the laws and regulations of the United States (which includes regulations of the armed forces) or of a State; international law; and the common law. See Drafters' Analysis, Drafter's Analysis, Manual for Courts-Martial, United States, A22-5 (2008 ed.) (hereinafter "Drafters' Analysis"). See United States v. Ayers, 54 M.J. 85, 90 (C.A.A.F. 2000) (a general regulation is a proper subject of judicial notice in a case charging a member with a violation of such a regulation). United States v. Commander, 39 M.J. 972, 977 (A.F.C.M.R. 1994) (panel instructed the military judge had taken judicial notice that anabolic steroids are a Schedule III controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970). [END FOOTNOTE 3]

“It is a ‘longstanding principle of American law “that legislation of Congress, unless a contrary intent appears, is meant to apply only within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”’” Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U. S. 247, 255 (2010). We have repeatedly explained that this principle, which we call the presumption against extraterritoriality, refers to a “presumption against application to conduct in the territory of another sovereign.” Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 569 U. S. 108, 119 (2013) (citing Morrison, 561 U. S., at 265). In other words, exclusively “‘[f]oreign conduct is generally the domain of foreign law.’” Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp., 550 U. S. 437, 455 (2007) (alteration omitted). The presumption “serves to avoid the international discord that can result when U. S. law is applied to conduct in foreign countries” and reflects the “‘commonsense notion that Congress generally legislates with domestic concerns in mind.’” RJR Nabisco, Inc. v. European Community, 579 U. S. 325, 335–336 (2016).

Applying the presumption against extraterritoriality involves “a two-step framework.” Id., at 337. At step one, we determine whether a provision is extraterritorial, and that determination turns on whether “Congress has affirmatively and unmistakably instructed that” the provision at issue should “apply to foreign conduct.” Id., at 335, 337; accord, Kiobel, 569 U. S., at 117 (asking whether Congress “intends federal law to apply to conduct occurring abroad”); Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe, 593 U. S. ___, ___ (2021) (slip op., at 3). If Congress has provided an unmistakable instruction that the provision is extraterritorial, then claims alleging exclusively foreign conduct may proceed, subject to “the limits Congress has (or has not) imposed on the statute’s foreign application.” RJR Nabisco, 579 U. S., at 337–338.

Similarly, in the context of patent enforcement, eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C. reversed a century of common patent practice in holding that injunctions should not routinely issue based on a finding of patent infringement.38 Rather, federal courts are now directed to weigh the more general four-factor test to determine whether an injunction should apply.39 Prior to eBay, prevailing patentees obtained injunctions in nearly every case in which they proved infringement.40 Subsequent to eBay, approximately 27% of infringement verdicts have resulted in damages rewards without an injunction, thereby weakening patent protection.41

While each study makes important contributions in assessing the strength of IPR protection in countries, several conceptual and measurement issues are raised. The first conceptual issue is which IPR laws must be examined to gauge protection. Rapp and Rozek's measure assumes patent laws are ipso facto IPR laws. However, services increasingly are accounting for larger portions of economic growth. The value of a name or identification therefore has significant economic impact. Particularly in western countries, the economic contributions of copyrighted software production, entertainment products, and publishing are significant. To discount these two forms of IP protection would be to underestimate their economic impact. Similarly, it has been argued elsewhere (Ostergard 1999; Hettinger 1989) that nations do not treat all IP equally. Some forms of IP are more important to nations' economies than others. Using patents as a proxy for all IPR may overlook this issue. While Seyoum measures the strength of these laws individually, Sherwood's measure blends five different forms of IPR laws into the measure. As I noted earlier, the combining of various laws into one conceptual measure of IPR protection may present some theoretical and methodological difficulty.

A second conceptual issue relates to the enforcement of the laws. Rapp and Rozek and Seyoum do not include a component for enforcement in their study, though Rapp and Rozek recognize the issue (1990a, 7). The logic behind this proposition is intuitively simple. Nations may have in place the institutional structures and financial resources to enforce these laws, but others that do not have these structures and resources may not be able to enforce the laws adequately. Sherwood too recognizes this issue by including an enforceability component in his measure, but it does not significantly address the behavior of the governing regime in enforcing the intellectual property laws. The enforcement component Sherwood uses reflects an assessment of the potential to enforce IPR laws and not an assessment of the regime's actual performance.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), including trademarks and patents, encourage creative activity for the benefit of a free society. Innovations are protected through IPR and inventors afford an opportunity to derive fair returns from their investments. The acquisition of Intellectual Property Rights is one of the primary tools for incentivizing creators in a modern economy. Property rights are human rights that spark innovation and nurture economic growth. It has been the most effective mechanism to guarantee civil rights and civil liberties. Protecting individual liberty is the fundamental reason for a system of strong private property rights.

Throughout the unprecedented pandemic crisis, there has been a continuing debate about pat- ents for medicines. The right balance provides early access to affordable medicines with sufficient flexibility to protect intellectual property (IP). Patents are a part of the solution for the COVID-19 vaccine. Dismantling patent protection is not correlated with IP. In fact, scientists developed vac- cines in record time because of the security and resources provided by IP systems.

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strengthen | BUSINESS ENGLISH

In April 2020 the UK Supreme Court had reason to discuss the difference between ‘significant’ and ‘substantial’ in the context of what is a ‘significant reduction in life expectancy’. The court said that ‘like the skin of a chameleon, the adjective takes a different colour so as to suit a different context’.

The word ‘significant’ often means something less than the word ‘substantial’. But in context it can mean ‘substantial’.

Hovenkamp et al., supra note 38, at 1758 (footnote omitted). O'Rourke and Brodley rightly note that the rule is ambiguous, because a "significant" likelihood of success means different things to different people. Maureen A. O'Rourke & Joseph A. Brodley, An Incentives Approach to Patent Settlements: A Commentary on Hovenkamp, Janis and Lemley, 87 MINN. L. REV. 1767, 1783 (2003).

When Adam Smith spoke about an “invisible hand,” he was talking about a good thing – the way that free markets harness the laws of competition, supply and demand and self-interest to improve the economy. But he also could have been thinking of another law. The law of unintended consequences: that actions of people, and especially of governments, always have unanticipated effects. Sometimes these effects can be perverse, reflecting a profound failure of “second-order thinking” (in other words, thinking ahead about “how could this possibly go wrong?”).

On January 5, 2023 – a day that may go down in IP infamy – we saw two bold actions. First, the “Protecting American IP Act” became law; and second, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposed a new rule that would invalidate noncompete agreements across the United States. But wait, you might say, that actually sounds great! What’s the problem with protecting American IP, and making the rest of the country join California in unleashing talent to go where it likes? Well, don’t be too hasty. Stay with me on this, and you will see just how shortsighted our government can be.

Rights are freedoms and entitlements granted to certain entities in a defined system, group, or theory. Even though rights are often granted as a bundle, they do not necessarily come all at once; i.e., some entities have rights that others do not. In recent decades, various technological advancements have been deployed and have started to function within society both at an individual and an institutional level. As their functions become common, scholars have begun to debate whether any rights should be granted to these new electronic agents [45, 59]. This discussion has become prominent after the circulation of a European Parliament draft report, where they considered creating “the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations”. The final report, however, rephrased the proposal after backslash from experts [2] by proposing to create “a specific legal status” for sufficiently autonomous robots [1].