Patents are designs and names, often officially registered, by which merchants or manu
The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G. Some of the paragraphs have been placed for you. (10 points)
A. Yet thieves still reap a rich harvest. Inadequate protection of U.S. patents, trademarks and copyrights costs the U.S. economy $80 billion in sales lost to pirates and 250,000 jobs every year, according to Gary Hoffman, an intellectual property attorney at Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin in Washington. The computer industry loses upwards of $4 billion of revenues a year to illegal copying of software programs. Piracy of movies, books and recordings costs the entertainment business at least $4 billion annually.
B. With intellectual property now accounting for more than 25% of U.S. exports (compared with just 12% eight years ago), protection against international piracy ranks high on the Bush Administration's trade agenda. The U.S. International Trade Commission, the federal agency that deals with unfair-trade complaints by American companies, is handling a record number of cases (38 last year). Says ITC Chairman Anne Brunsdale: "Conceptual property has replaced produce and heavy machinery as the hotbed of trade disputes".
C. The battle is widening—U.S. companies filed more than 5,700 intellectual-property lawsuits last year in contrast to 3,800 in 1980—and the stakes can be enormous. In the biggest patent-infringement case to date, Eastman Kodak was ordered last October to pay $900 million for infringing on seven Polaroid instant-photography patents. In a far-reaching copyright case, book publishers scored an important victory in March when a federal court in New York City fined the Kinko's Graphics national chain of copying stores $510,000 for illegally photocopying and selling excerpts of books to college students.
D. Although the verdict is subject to appeal, the award underscores the growing importance of protecting intellectual property. That phrase may seem entirely too grand to apply to a song like If You Don't Want My Peaches, You'd Better Stop Shaking My Tree, but it actually encompasses the whole vast range of creative ideas that turn out to have value—and many of them have more value than ever. From Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse to Upjohn's formula for its anti-baldness potion, patents, trademarks and copyrights have become corporate treasures that their owners will do almost anything to protect.
E. In an economy increasingly based on information and technology, ideas and creativity often embody most of a company's wealth. That is why innovations are being patented, trademarked and copyrighted in record numbers. It is also why today's clever thief doesn't rob banks, many of which are broke anyway; he makes unauthorized copies of Kevin Costner's latest film, sells fake Cartier watches and steals the formula for Merck's newest pharmaceutical. That's where the money is.
F. One reason is that any countries offer only feeble protection to intellectual property. Realizing that such laxness will exclude them from much world trade as Well as hobble native industries, nations everywhere are revising laws covering patents, copyrights and trade names. Malaysia, Egypt, China, turkey, Brazil and even the Soviet Union have all recently announced plans either to enact new laws or beef up existing safeguards. In an effort to win U.S. congressional support for a proposed free-trade pact, Mexico last month revealed, plans to double the life of trademark licenses to 10 years and extend patent protection for the first time to such products as pharmaceuticals and food.
G. Companies are cracking down on pirates who steal designs, movies and computer programs. The battle is getting hotter—and more important. When Johnson & Johnson introduced a new fiber-glass casting tape for broken bones several years ago, executives at Minnesota Mining &
Biological Mimicry
The Invention of Velcro
After taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to the dog's fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook-and-loop system that the seeds have evolved to hitchhike on passing animals and aid pollination, and he realised that the same approach could be used to join other things together. The result was Velcro, a product that was arguably more than three billion years in the making, since that is how long the natural mechanism that inspired it took to evolve.
Velcro is probably the most famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry, or "biomimetics". In. fields from robotics to materials science, tech nologists are increasingly borrowing ideas from nature, and with good reason: nature's designs have, by definition, stood the test of time, so it would be foolish to ignore them. Yet transplanting natural designs into man-made technologies is still a hit-or-miss affair.
"Engineers depend on biologists to discover interesting mechanisms for them to exploit," says Julian Vincent, the director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the University of Bath in England. So he and his colleagues have been working on a scheme to enable engineers to bypass the biologists and tap into nature's ingenuity directly, via a database of "biological patents". The idea is that this database will let anyone search through a wide range of biological mechanisms and properties to find natural solutions to technological problems.
The Power of Biomimetics
Surely human intellect, and the deliberate application of design knowledge, can devise better mechanisms than the mindless, random process of evolution? Over billions of years of trial and error, nature has devised effective solutions to all sorts of complicated real-world problems. Take the slippery task of controlling a submersible vehicle, for example. Using propellers, it is incredibly difficult to make refined movements. But Nekton Research, a company based in Durham, North Carolina, has developed a robot fish called Madeleine that man oeuvres using fins instead.
In some cases, engineers can spend decades inventing and perfecting a new technology, only to discover that nature beat them to it. The Venus flower basket, for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are remarkably similar, both in appearance and optical properties, to commercial optical fibres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Lucent Technology's Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. And sometimes the systems found in nature can make even the most advanced technologies look primitive by comparison, she says.
The skeletons of brittle stars, which are sea creatures related to starfish and sea urchins (海胆), contain thousands of tiny lenses that collectively form. a single, distributed eye. This enables brittle stars to escape predators and distinguish between night and day. Besides having unusual optical properties and being very small-- each is just one twentieth of a millimetre in diameter —the lenses have another trick of particular relevance to micro-optical systems. Although the lenses are fixed in shape, they are connected via a network 0f fluid-filled channels, containing a light-absorbing pigment. The creature can vary the contrast of the lenses by controlling this fluid. The same idea can be applied in man-made lenses, says Dr Aizenberg. "These are made from silicon and so cannot change their properties," she says. But by copying the brittle star's fluidic system, she has been able to make biomimetic lens arrays with the same flexibility.
Another demonstration of the power of biomimetics comes from the gecko(壁虎). This lizard's ability to wal
A.Y
B.N
C.NG
My patents had trouble ______ living in any new place.
A.according to
B.adjusting to
C.to adapt to
D.to turn to
A.the costs of granting tech patents are low
B.tech first-movers are rewarded with high margins
C.tech patents are mutually dependent on each other
D.tech groups keep their patents low-profile deliberately
Licensed Patents, as used herein, ()all patents and patent applications.
A、shall mean
B、means
C、should mean
D、shall have meant
A、Monographs
B、Research articles
C、News reports
D、Patents
What are the arguments for the private ownership of genome patents?
A.The ownership encourages innovation.
B.The ownership has long been part of European Way.
C.The ownership may mark the discovery of the DNA double helix.
Why does the author call this article "Conquest by Patents"?
A.Because most trade agreements are unfair to developing nations
B.Because patents cost too much money for developing nations
C.Because industrialized countries do not pay their debts to developing nations
D.Because natural resources are a source of power for developing nations
Your patents won't let you drink dirty water because ______.
A.they think it will bring illness to you
B.water can't be drunk
C.you are ill and unhappy
A.easily perceived or understood
B.quite apparent
C.standing in the way or in front
D.transparent
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