Diritti di proprietà intellettuale: sviluppi recenti e prospettive di riforma[Intellectual property rights: recent developements and reform prospects]

This thesis deals with the influence of the international regime of intellectual property established by the Marrakesh Agreement (WTO) in 1995 on the world economy and more specifically on the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The establishment of a patent was first granted in the fifteenth century by the Republic of Venice and has gone through changes, reforms, and codifications until today. This tool no longer has only the function of protection and remuneration of the inventor, but it can in a globalized world context determine through adequate sets of rules (such as the WTO agreements) the development of some countries, the health condition of entire populations, the beginning ( or conversely the end) of severe recessions in major economies. Pagano-Rossi advance in "The crash of the knowledge economy" the hypothesis of a link between the growing privatization of knowledge in an international context, as a reason behind the difficulties in operating and investing in high-intensity intellectual, and the onset of the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The solutions suggested in order to unlock the knowledge "blocked" by the high price barriers are on the one side boosting open science (starting from the existing forms: open source, commons licenses, platforms for sharing educational material); on the other side industrial policy measures should be taken in order to make privately held assets publicly available, to put the potential productivity of the system into action. The Italian situation, specifically that of the region Friuli Venezia Giulia is taken into consideration. A policy made of four “main trends” is the solution put forward to meet the SMEs’(the entrepreneurial form that characterizes the regional and national productive system) demand for affordable technology. A “buyout and redistribution” kind of intervention is conceived for the existing assets, while current research and emerging technologies should be patented and licensed under non-exclusive contracts, following the American model of Allied Security Trust. The trade-off between static efficiency and dynamic efficiency must be rebalanced, providing innovating and virtuous companies with public incentives/benefit (where the buyout operation prevented them from getting a natural reward from the market itself). In the field of management of the research, priorities include the training of professionals for the piloting of projects and funding, a more market-oriented research (to overcome the lack of public funds in times of crisis), the enhancing of University-enterprises-institutions networks, to avoid he duplication of efforts and to maximize the resources and assets already available.