The latest World Intellectual Property Office Podcast featured Professor Joy Xiang’s monograph on climate change, sustainable development, and clean technology.
The monograph and six published papers flowed from Professor Xiang’s research project on international technology transfer. The project seems needed and timely: a reputed publisher in the subject matters initiated a book contract that would result in this monograph upon hearing Professor Xiang’s first academic talk on the project; around the monograph’s publication, invitations from WIPO, WTO, or UC Berkeley Law for discussions on the monograph arrived. Professor Xiang is grateful for the generous support from colleagues such as Professors Joshua Sarnoff, Edward Lee, Jorge Contreras, Peter Yu, Abbe Brown, Robert Merges, Francis Snyder, and Stephen Minas and her research assistants at PKU-STL.
Based on evidential data and interdisciplinary analysis, the monograph concludes that international cleantech transfer to developing countries since the 1970s has been limited. More importantly, the monograph concludes that we need to emphasize both domestic innovation and international technology transfer so that the global community, especially developing countries, may meet the demands of climate change and sustainable development.
The monograph also concludes that intellectual property protection generally is necessary for developing countries to attract advanced foreign technologies and to foster sustainable domestic innovation. The monograph suggests a pathway for developing countries, especially the least developed countries, to forge a journey through international aid and mutually-beneficial international technology cooperation, to arrive at sustainable domestic innovation.
Specifically, the monograph advocates for collaborative and creative intellectual property rights management for international cleantech transfer and cooperation. The monograph also suggests developing countries leverage existing means in both the intellectual property regime and competition law regime to address challenges they encounter when licensing foreign clean technologies, besides efforts to reform the existing international intellectual property regime.
