Jacques de Werra (ed.), Accords de technologie/Technology Transactions

• Author: Pedro Roffe
• Position: Senior Fellow at International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) and Former Senior Official of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
• Pages: 95-99

Book Review

2020

95

1

Jacques de Werra (ed.),

Accords de technologie/ Technology

Transactions, 2018, 128 p.

by Pedro Roffe, Senior Fellow at International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) and

Former Senior Official of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

© 2020 Pedro Roffe

Everybody may disseminate this ar ticle by electronic m eans and make it available for downloa d under the terms and

conditions of the Digital P eer Publishing Licence (DPPL). A copy of the license text may be obta ined at http://nbn-resolving.

de/urn:nbn:de:0009-dppl-v3-en8.

Recommended citation: Pedr o Roffe, Book Review: Jacques de Werr a (ed.), Accords de technologie/ Technology Transactions,

11 (2020) JIPITEC 95 para 1.

Preliminaries

1

Technology Transactions is part of an intellectual

property (IP) Series published by the Faculty of Law

of the Geneva University.1 It is the 11th volume of

a publication launched in 2008. The latest brings

together papers presented at a conference organized

on occasion of the 2018 Intellectual Property Day.



and practioners -Marco M. Aleman, Christoph

Spennemann, Mark Anderson, Philippe Gilliéron and

Adrien Alberini- are reproduced in the book in their

original English and French versions.

2

Technology transactions embrace a diversity of

contractual relationships wherein the parties

agree to share, under mutually agreed conditions, a

technology owned by one of the parties as intellectual

property rights (IPRs). The book deals with a range

of transactions including patent assignments,

licensing, research and joint development. The

central purpose of this work is to offer an overview

of perspectives on some of the thorniest questions

facing technology agreements. A unifying thread of



1 <https://www.unige.ch/droit/jdpi/>.

economic relevance, technology transactions do not



and in the case of domestic law their treatment is far

from being homogenous. The lack of harmonization

is striking in an area that is transnational by nature.

Licensing agreements generally cover several

geographical areas.

3

The volume begins with a preface by Professor de

Werra, who has devoted an important part of his

academic work to these issues, underlining that an

   

drivers of the globalized knowledge economy in

which businesses, institutions and societies operate.

He refers particularly to knowledge of a technical

nature -often protected by intellectual property law

as in the case of patents, trade secrets, copyright -

which is transferred and disseminated in contractual

transactions of a diversity of forms. Despite their

frequency, technology agreements continue to raise

multiple legal issues not only internationally, but

also at the national level. According to Professor de

Werra, there are many reasons for this: technology

agreements are at the intersection of distinct legal

disciplines (notably contracts, intellectual property,

  

matter are intangible assets that by their very nature

Book Review