World Intellectual Property Organization

The process of Ukraine's integration into the European Union necessitates the harmonization of the national administrative and legal system with European standards. One of the most developed and influential models of administrative law in Europe is the French one, which combines an effective institutional structure of public administration, effective mechanisms for protecting citizens' rights and economic feasibility of regulation. Analysis of the French experience is especially important for Ukraine in the context of public administration reform, decentralization and increasing transparency of government activities. Therefore, the study of the economic and legal foundations of the Europeanization of administrative law of Ukraine through the prism of the French model is relevant both in scientific and practical terms, as it contributes to the formation of an effective, accountable and citizen-oriented public administration. The purpose of the study is to analyze the economic and legal foundations of French administrative law and determine the possibilities of their adaptation for the harmonization of the administrative and legal system of Ukraine with the standards of the European Union. The research methodology consists of comparative legal, empirical and formal-dogmatic methods, as well as induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis methods, which together provide a comprehensive and systematic study. The article analyzes the economic and legal foundations of the Europeanization of administrative law in Ukraine through the prism of the French administrative law system. In particular, a comparative analysis of the French and Ukrainian administrative law systems is carried out in order to identify European trends that shape the legal architecture of Ukrainian administrative law in the context of European integration. The authors state that although French administrative law has a tradition of over two hundred years, and Ukrainian administrative law has only begun to be institutionally formed since the 1990s, both systems tend to share common principles of the rule of law, public accountability and effective administration. It is emphasized that in France there is no formal distinction of administrative law into general and special, instead there is a substantive differentiation into institutional and functional areas - administrative police, public enterprises, healthcare, security, civil service, etc. In Ukraine, on the contrary, a clear distinction has been introduced into general, special and special administrative law, which corresponds to the structure of national legislation and the practice of its codification. It is emphasized that the French system is based on the case law of the French Council of State, while the Ukrainian one is based on codified administrative proceedings. The generalization of the results of the comparison indicates the gradual Europeanization of Ukrainian administrative law through the implementation of both regulatory and institutional principles of public administration. The French experience serves as a guideline for improving the Ukrainian administrative model, ensuring compliance with European Union standards and developing the doctrinal basis of national law.

Competition among firms has increasingly been through design. We show how computer vision algorithms can be leveraged to measure the visual similarity of design rights across large data sets of product design images. In particular: we extract and standardize 716,168 unique design images included in US design patents (1976–2023); adapt the structural similarity index measure to quantify design similarities between images; and rigorously validate the resulting measure of design rights similarity. We then use that measure to produce novel empirical evidence that a design space's similarity density exhibits an inverted U-shape with respect to the likelihood of that space's design rights being litigated—a relationship proposed previously but never tested. Our design rights similarity measure should facilitate the exploration of new research questions in the fields of design rights, innovation, and strategy. We grant open access to our code and data resources to encourage research in such fields. • We develop a method for measuring design similarity via SSIM on 716,168 US design patent images (1976–2023). • We validated the similarity measure through three strategies: (1) correlational validity (2) predictive validity; and (3) human validity. • We conceptualize design space similarity density (DSSD) as the degree of visual similarityin a design space and show its role in shaping firms’ litigation strategy. • We show an inverted U-shaped relationship between DSSD and litigation. • We release the full dataset and code to support future research on design rights, innovation and IP strategy using visual similarity measures.

Plain Language SummaryA suicidal patient with Short‐lasting Unilateral Neuralgiform headache attacks with Conjunctival injection and Tearing (SUNCT) whose excruciating condition did not respond to various treatments discovered that ayahuasca, a psychoactive concoction used by indigenous populations of South America, caused his attacks to cease entirely. Inhaled N,N‐dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the principal psychoactive component of ayahuasca, also caused symptoms to disappear temporarily, as did a strong dose of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). This case study supports the potential of serotonergic psychedelics for the treatment of SUNCT and related headache disorders.

If several surveys seem to indicate that firms no longer recognise patents as an effective defence mechanism, patent applications have been on a surge since the mid-1980s. Those same surveys argue that firms still apply for patents, but mostly for different motivations than protection, most of them related to strategic purposes. Previous works, both empirical and conceptual, already identified several of those strategies. However, their analysis remains limited by the use of survey data, while a substantial amount of information is freely available through patent data. Based on patent quality indicators from the literature, we aim to contribute to the innovation appropriation strategy literature by providing new empirical observation through the case study of the cosmetic sector. Our results reveal three specific patenting behaviours: patenting for image purposes, differences between specialists and generalist firms, and the strategy of a sectorial leader facing oligopolistic competitors.

As novelty is a core value in science, a reliable approach to measuring the novelty of scientific documents is critical. Previous novelty measures however had a few limitations. First, the majority of previous measures are based on recombinant novelty concept, attempting to identify a novel combination of knowledge elements, but insufficient effort has been made to identify a novel element itself (element novelty). Second, most previous measures are not validated, and it is unclear what aspect of newness is measured. Third, some of the previous measures can be computed only in certain scientific fields for technical constraints. This study thus aims to provide a validated and field-universal approach to computing element novelty. We drew on machine learning to develop a word embedding model, which allows us to extract semantic information from text data. Our validation analyses suggest that our word embedding model does convey semantic information. Based on the trained word embedding, we quantified the element novelty of a document by measuring its distance from the rest of the document universe. We then carried out a questionnaire survey to obtain self-reported novelty scores from 800 scientists. We found that our element novelty measure is significantly correlated with self-reported novelty in terms of discovering and identifying new phenomena, substances, molecules, etc. and that this correlation is observed across different scientific fields.

We study how trademarks affect reuse of creative works in the comics industry. As a creative industry, the comics industry systematically relies on copyrights. But trademark protection can also be exploited to generate income from the reuse of comic characters or to strategically exclude others from reuse. Our unique data set combines US trademark records of comic characters with information on reuse in print media and franchise products from 1990 to 2017. We find that, on average, additional trademark protection is associated with a reduction in reuse in printed comic books of about 19%. We highlight three mechanisms: first, the negative relationship between trademarking and reuse has been especially pronounced since the early 2000s, when the arrival of digital technologies lowered the costs of entry, promotion, and distribution. Second, our results are driven by less reuse by third parties, not trademark holders. Third, reuse is higher when trademark owners license comic characters to third parties. The negative association between trademarking and reuse carries over to franchise products, but it is weaker and tied to the era of digitization, with a 2% decline in reuse in franchise movies and 9% lower reuse in video games.