DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES BETWEEN PATENTS, REGISTERED DESIGNS AND COPYRIGHTS: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS.

Most of the literature on intellectual property protection focuses on patenting and neglects alternatives, such as registered designs and copyrights. The literature that includes these alternatives generally treats them as nominal alternatives, and ignores the fact that copyrights are cheaper and easier to obtain than patents or registered designs, which would make it more sensible to treat them as ordinal. However, this ordinal behaviour could not be confirmed on the Dutch 2006 Community Innovation Survey dataset. Treating our protection variable as multinomial confirmed the influences on patenting found in the literature, but showed registered designs and copyrights to behave differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]