The impact is extinction – That’s Schmidt – the US has historically been ahead on innovation but China is rapidly catching up. Prefer our ev – it cites empirical examples and explicitly makes a brink claim. A failure to evolve wrecks deterrence and soft power leading to inevitable quickly escalating conflict that controls every other impact <insert turns the case etc. here>

Suthersanen 19 [Uma, holds a Chair in Global Intellectual Property Law and is the current Director of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute. Uma was previously the Academic Director of the London Intellectual Property Law LLM (2012-2021), and the Paris Intellectual Property Law LLM (2012-2015). “Utility models: do they really serve national innovation strategies?,” chapter from The Innovation Society and Intellectual Property, e,dited by Josef Drexl and Anselm Kamperman Sanders, , ALB]

1 INTRODUCTION In the past two decades, there has been a growing belief within the intellectual property fraternity about the desirability for and the relevance of a further tier of patentlike protection within the general intellectual property framework. Such laws, usually referred to as utility model laws, are considered to be conducive to innovation and growth in two different economic environments. First, within established, developed economies, alternative sui generis regimes are viewed as a means of ameliorating the shortcomings of patent law, especially in relation to small and medium sized enterprises in nationally important socioeconomic sectors. Second, legal and economic scholars have praised the utility model regime as a necessary facet in promoting a sustainable development space to help struggling economies promote indigenous innovation.1

The first two sections of this chapter focus on the legal nature of and justificatory bases for ‘utility model’ protection. In doing so, the analysis briefly considers the normative economic rationales for protecting innovation under intellectual property law. The next section carries out a chronologically based and comparative analysis of several utility model systems around the world. In adopting this approach, the chapter attempts to determine whether utility models should, in certain predetermined circumstances, be promoted as a more dominant form of intellectual property right in a country or region, as this would enhance development and innovation. It does this by exploring the perceived link between utility model law and innovation from the standpoint of two fundamental queries:

(1) Is it valid for a country to introduce a second tier patent law on the basis that the deficiencies of the traditional patent system can be either solved or avoided?

(2) Irrespective of the perceived deficiencies of a patent system, does the utility model law offer a robust ecosystem promoting innovation?