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As intellectual property (IP) rules increasingly occur in the international trade policies, the change of IP rules in the free trade agreement (FTA) shows the trend of TRIPS-plus, leading the trade friction between countries into fierce IP competition. To clarify how the IP rules influence the export trade structure and to provide theoretical and practical advice for reconstructing free trade rules on international protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs), this study applies gap analysis and gravitation modeling on the 63 FTAs signed by significant economies in the Asia-Pacific region during the year 2000–2018. Finally, we find out that the sealing of the FTA IP rules would increase the proportion of IP-intensive and TM-intensive products in the total export trade. Incredibly pointed, enhancing the protection intensity is more significant for optimizing export trade structure in developed countries than in less developed countries.

Data mining aims at extracting knowledge from data. Sometimes this requires the data owner to make data available to the data analyst. Unless the analyst is trusted by the data owner, the latter may wish to have his intellectual property rights protected. Watermarking is a way to provide some protection, not only for multimedia data, but also for numerical data. It consists of imperceptibly embedding a secret mark into the data to be protected. The mark can later be used to resolve any subsequent disputes on data ownership. This paper presents a watermarking method that embeds a watermark into each attribute of a multivariate continuous numerical dataset. This watermarking method is shown to be robust against random noise addition attacks. Data quality is assured to the extent that the watermarked data nearly preserve the attribute means and the covariance matrix from the original dataset. Our proposal is the first known watermarking system for multivariate numerical datasets with such robustness and quality properties.

As the subject of pollutant emissions, enterprises play an important role in environmental governance and should consciously fulfil their environmental responsibility. So, can the enterprise perform environmental responsibility to increase their investment in research and development (R&D)? Based on the data from China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed enterprises in 2011–2019, this paper explores the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and R&D investment and examines the dual moderating effects of public attention and intellectual property protection. It is found that the implementation of corporate environmental responsibility can promote R&D investment. Public attention moderates the positive relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and R&D investment; it seeks that the positive relationship becomes higher with public attention. With higher regional intellectual property protection levels, the moderating effect of public attention on corporate environmental responsibility and R&D investment will be more obviously higher. This research provides theoretical support for enterprises to fulfil their environmental responsibilities and a new perspective for revealing the factors of enterprises’ R&D investment, which can offer a foundation for future research and practices.

Innovation outsourcing creates two critical risks for a client firm. The first risk arises when a client discloses his/her technological knowhow and intellectual property (IP) with the service provider but the latter misappropriates the IP toward its own commercial benefit. Second, in the absence of perfect monitoring, the service provider might exert suboptimal effort on the innovation project. Management of client’s technology and innovation effort of agent are both crucially important in innovation outsourcing. It is shown that client can deter these risks by designing an appropriate contract. Two distinct regimes are considered. In Regime1, the client operates in an environment where IP cannot be protected. In Regime2, client’s IP is fully protected either due to strong legal enforcement or due to availability of a technological solution. First, it is found that an incentive payment scheme linked with project outcome can mitigate the shirking problem. Second, in Regime1, the client must provide higher compensation to the agent when compared to Regime2. A carrot and stick strategy involving higher incentive payments along with reduced sharing of background IP can deter the opportunistic behavior of the service provider. Third, if the cost of operating in Regime2 is prohibitively high, then the client can operate in Regime1 and yet obtain higher profits. In such a scenario, the client must use the carrot and stick strategy. Finally, due to predominant motive to reduce costs, clients might not be compensating their service providers appropriately. Such myopic cost-cutting strategy would exacerbate the IP misappropriation and suboptimal quality problems associated with outsourcing.