Discrimination against Foreigners
The Wuerttemberg Patent Law in Administrative Practice
Philosophische Fakultät
Economists stress the leading role that inclusive institutions play among the various factors that foster a country’s economic growth. In this article, we show that it might be misleading to mistake the codification of a formal rule for its effective administrative implementation. As the case of the German state Wuerttemberg demonstrates, a government’s lip service to the
principle of equal treatment does not guarantee that the local patent authority refrains from
discriminating against foreign patentees by charging comparatively high patent fees. We
conclude that the introduction of a stringent and formally fair patent law alone does not
guarantee that foreign inventors’ intellectual property rights are protected as well as those of
the domestic patentees.
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