Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2008, History

This study attempts to fill a gap in the historiography on the formation of American copyright law by exploring the specific historical nature of print culture in the late eighteenth-century which directly influenced copyright's development. Those who campaigned for copyright protection espoused its broad nationalistic implications in the wake of a socially and politically disruptive revolution, and its eventual legislative design recognized a distinct tension between private interests and the public sphere as it embodied the pervasive republican values of the early national period. This examination seeks to clarify how the conceptual architecture of copyright was initially framed in the United States in order to more insightfully and constructively address the question of the continued utility of its function established by historical precedent. The first chapter of this study argues that the earliest calls for copyright legislation in the United States immediately after the Revolution were inextricably intertwined with the efforts to construct a distinctly American national identity. As the dictates of print-capitalism were quickly becoming institutionalized, prominent copyright advocates argued that copyright was necessary both to protect the indigenous American authorial class and their labors from the widespread practice of literary piracy and to encourage others to participate in the craft of authorship. They argued provocatively – and successfully – that copyright laws would indeed serve as declarations of cultural independence from Britain, and would help establish America's cultural parity with the greatest powers in the world. Whereas colonial printmen played the most critical role in shaping American identity throughout the 1760s and 1770s by producing a deluge of literature in opposition to parliamentary imperial policies, I argue that the calls for copyright laws in the post-revolutionary period were an attempt by American intellectual writers to establ (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Mancke PhD (Advisor) Subjects: American History; American Literature; American Studies; Education History; History; Law

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2008, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2023, Theatre Arts-Arts Administration

Choreography is the creator's intellectual property and, therefore, ought to be treated as such. However, legal protection can be granted only if the Copyright Office deems this work worthy of protection. This research aims to examine the laws concerning claiming ownership of choreographic works through copyright protection. The objective of this review is to provide a timeline of showing when the concept of copyrighting choreography began to where it stands today. A legal analysis is conducted to determine whether the current system of copyright protection can be applied to choreographic works; and, therefore, how it affects enforcement. Case examples of choreographic infringement, ownership loss, and successful enforcement will be reviewed.

Committee: Arnold Tunstall (Committee Chair); Jodi Kearns (Committee Member); Colleen Barnes (Committee Member) Subjects: Dance

MFIS, Kent State University, 2022, College of the Arts / School of Fashion

NINA KESIC, M.F.I.S., APRIL 2022 DESIGN APPROPRIATION IN THE FASHION INDUSTRY: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AS A PLATFORM TO AID DESIGNERS Director of Thesis: Mourad Krifa, Ph.D. As social media platforms continue to evolve, new opportunities become available to share content. For fashion designers, showcasing designs on social media is a great way to spread brand awareness and generate greater engagement levels. However, housing design content online can also subject independent designers to design piracy or appropriation. Faced with such practices and with no legal recourse, independent designers have taken to social media as a tool to express their grievances with being victims of design appropriation. The objectives of this study are (1) to investigate how designers can (and do) use social media to combat copying of their designs, and (2) to identify what the overall user response is to these social media callouts. A sample of TikTok videos was collected from independent designers sharing personal accounts about this issue. The videos were coded for different response types, in which most of the responses exhibited a negative tone. However, the social media category presented a more positive tone, indicating that designers found the use of social media helpful in combating this issue. The results of this study provide insight on the effects that design appropriation has on independent designers and how the fashion industry can collectively work on a solution for this rampant issue.

Committee: Mourad Krifa (Advisor); Jihyun Kim-Vick (Committee Member); Lauren Copeland (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Ohio University, 2021, Business Administration

In summary, this paper explored developments in creative intellectual property management, and then put into a plan a way to leverage such changes into an applicable 83 business model. The recent literature on creative industries, intellectual property, and related industry disruption was reviewed to paint an accurate picture of the state and future of creative intellectual property industries. The topics discussed in those articles were then synthesized into overarching lessons, including motivators for creative talent, consumer reactions to intellectual property protections, and guidelines for innovation in related industries. These lessons were then put into practice to formulate a business plan for a music publishing company. The business plan for Athena Publishing was based on insights derived from the literature review. It is broken into multiple sections: executive summary, industry overview, trends, business services, competition, management and operations, and operation milestones and financial projections. These were the most essential aspects of AP, and they encompass the business' overall strategy. AP was designed to use the knowledge acquired by the review to assist musical artists in their careers. The exercise of creating AP's plan was as valuable to reaching that goal as the initial literature review.

Committee: Paul Mass (Advisor) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Electrical and Computer Engineering

With the globalization of the semiconductor industry and increased reliance on intellectual property (IP) blocks in integrated circuit (IC) design; malicious modifications, IP theft, and cloning have started to pose a significant economic and security threat. To mitigate this risk, logic locking (LL) techniques have been proposed to obscure the chip functionality and increase the difficulty to insert a trigger-based change via a hardware trojan. This is accomplished through the introduction of localized key gates, which corrupt the IC's function unless the correct key is supplied. The effectiveness of any LL technique, however, depends on the target design, the extent of locking, and where the locking elements are placed. Current attacks on LL focus primarily on Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) solvers, which require the use of a fully operational chip (oracle) and rely solely on the input and output data through functional testing. To the authors' best knowledge, no current attacks exploit the design's underlying structure, vast amount of repetition, or circuit reuse. In this work, we propose a systematic method, borrowed from the network analysis domain, to analyze and exploit the local and global structure of circuits. The methods presented in this work demonstrates that LL minimally effects the underlying structure, allowing for circuit identification and key bit prediction without the need of an oracle. Moreover, this work also presents a framework in which to capture the security level of LL based on the amount of information leakage through our analysis techniques. Additionally, the framework can be expanded to incorporate other attack methods to create an overall security assessment of any implemented LL. To this end, the analyses and theory introduced in this work demonstrate the need for new comprehensive LL techniques, and proposes the method in which to validate their security.

Committee: Waleed Khalil PhD (Advisor); Hesham El Gamal PhD (Committee Member); Xinmiao Zhang PhD (Committee Member); Radu Teodorescu PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Engineering; Electrical Engineering

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Economics

My research concerns how governments make economic decisions and interact with other governments, to increase social welfare; in particular, my focus lies in the area of taxation and technological innovation. In a globalized economy with mobile capital, increasing interest has been paid to capital tax policy. My research is among the first to examine empirically and explain theoretically the tax competition among states in the U.S. Moreover, I also study how state governments set their tax rates using historical data and explain why the pattern observed is different from the zero-tax theory. Due to the absence of state-level average capital tax rate data, I first construct a panel dataset of average capital income tax rates at the state level for the period 1958-2007 for the capital taxation studies. In Chapter 1, I analyze the tax policy of each individual state government. Empirical evidence implies that tax rates are history-dependent. I provide an alternative explanation for nonzero capital tax rate, reexamining Ramsey's (1927) rule. With a lack of commitment power from government, households form adaptive expectations on capital tax rates. The equilibrium capital tax rate is thus history-dependent with a balanced-budget requirement on state governments. The investment decision combines income and substitution effects, and the U.S. states differ on investment sensitivity to capital tax rates. I provide empirical findings on investment sensitivity for each state, and then a structural model is applied to replicate the empirical. In Chapter 2, I analyze the pattern of strategic interaction on capital tax rates among states in the U.S. This paper is the first to apply MLE estimation of the SAR panel data model with fixed-effects to study tax competition behavior. Through a joint investigation into both tax competition behavior and capital allocation decision, I demonstrate the existence of capital tax competition among states in the South and West, but compe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Pok-Sang Lam (Advisor); Lucia Dunn (Committee Member); Stephen Cosslett (Committee Member) Subjects: Economic Theory; Economics; Intellectual Property

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Business Administration

In the last fifteen years there has been a drastic increase in the outsourcing of manufacturing activities to offshore suppliers, otherwise known as offshore outsourcing. These offshore outsourcing endeavors have often encountered a variety of unanticipated or hidden costs. While these hidden costs can manifest in a variety of forms, two of the main variations are intellectual property risk (i.e., supplier poaching) and quality risk (i.e., supplier shirking). The research in this dissertation utilizes dyadic data from 109 manufacturer-supplier relationships to investigate how the institutional environment of a supplier's location influences the effectiveness of different safeguards and relationship management practices, which can result in increased poaching and shirking. Understanding how to control these hidden costs of outsourcing is what differentiates successful outsourcing relationships and is of critical importance to manufacturers. Manufacturers are often putting their innovations at risk by outsourcing to suppliers in geographical locations that do not protect intellectual property. For that reason, poaching, or supplier's unauthorized use of a buyer's proprietary information, has been considered one of the main hidden costs of outsourcing. The strength of property rights has also been suggested to influence the effectiveness that safeguards have on poaching. Building on these arguments, this dissertation investigates how property rights impact the effectiveness of two safeguards, supplier transaction specific assets and communication, on poaching. Property rights are found to not only have a direct effect on supplier poaching, but they also change the effectiveness of both safeguards. In weak property rights locations, communication is found to be more effective in reducing poaching. Interestingly, in weak property rights locations not only are supplier transaction specific assets less effective in reducing poaching, but increases in these investments (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: W.C. Benton Jr. (Advisor); Peter Ward (Committee Member); James Hill (Committee Member); Sean Handley (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2016, English

From prompts to share, update, and retweet, social media platforms increasingly insist that creating widespread circulation is the operative goal for networked writing. In response, researchers from multiple disciplines have investigated digital circulation through a number of lenses (e.g., affect theory, transnational feminism, political economy, public sphere theory, and more). In rhetoric and writing studies, scholars have argued that writing for circulation—i.e., envisioning how one's writing may gain speed, distance, and momentum—should be a prime concern for teachers and researchers of writing (e.g., Gries, 2015; Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2009; Porter, 2009; Sheridan, Ridolfo, & Michel, 2012). Such work has suggested that circulation is a consequence of rhetorical delivery and, as such, is distinctly about futurity. While a focus on writing for circulation has been productive, I argue that that writing in circulation can be equally productive. Challenging the tendency to position circulation as an exclusive concern for delivery, this project argues that circulation is not just as an end goal for rhetorical activity but also as a viable inventional resource for writers with diverse rhetorical goals. To make this case, I construct a methodology of assemblage to retell stories of tactical rhetorics. Grounded in the cultural notion of metis (an adaptable, embodied, and wily intelligence), the framework of tactical rhetorics seeks to describe embodied practices that pull materials out of circulation, reconfigure them, and redeploy them for new, often political effects. Blending historical inquiry with case-based methods, I assemble an array of stories that include practices of critical imitation, collage, tactical media, remix, digital hijacks, and protest bots. In retelling these stories, I show how tactical approaches are inventive in their attempts to solve problems, effect change, or call out injustice. In the process, my project pushes toward a critical circul (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Porter (Advisor); Heidi McKee (Committee Member); Jason Palmeri (Committee Member); Michele Simmons (Committee Member); James Coyle (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Intellectual Property; Multimedia Communications; Rhetoric

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2014, Arts and Sciences: Political Science

In 2012, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) submitted a high-standards intellectual property (IP) provision to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiation forum. Indications that this provision is incredibly aggressive were seemingly confirmed by a series of draft leaks on the Internet, leading to overwhelmingly negative assessments of the USTR and the U.S. trade agenda in the Asia-Pacific. However, these scholars and analysts have not adequately addressed the strategic element of the U.S. trade agenda regarding intellectual property. Arguments have been made regarding the strategic importance of the TPP negotiations, as a whole, to the U.S.: economically, politically, and even militarily. I will argue that the U.S. trade agenda regarding intellectual property in the Asia-Pacific region, specifically, is not counter to these strategic interests. Examining the reasoning behind this policy is the primary objective of this comparative analysis of the perceived intellectual property protections of TPP states. One of the primary, overarching purposes of this examination is to contribute to the discussion of intellectual property as an all-encompassing security issue. I propose that promoting the effective enforcement and implementation of intellectual property protections within other countries provides the United States with a mechanism for countering the unilaterally insurmountable security issues of the twenty-first century, including cyber-espionage and forced technology transfer. I will argue that it is the long-term external effects that provide the most persuasive explanation for U.S. behavior in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. The United States is still proceeding in a strategic manner, establishing long-term mechanisms for the protection of U.S. interests abroad through bilateral and small-scale trans-regional agreements with limited membership rather than global international institutions in an effort to hedge against the rising powe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Thomas Moore Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Richard Harknett Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: International Relations

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Business Administration

The leakage of an organization's proprietary, digital assets to unauthorized parties can be a catastrophic event for any organization. The magnitude of these events have been recently underscored by the Target data breach, in which 70 million consumer credit card accounts were compromised, and financial costs are expected to exceed $1 billion. Digital assets have steadily progressed beyond low-value data and information, and into high-value knowledge-based domains. Failures to protect these latter types of digital assets can have even greater implications for firms or even macroeconomic conditions. Using the Target event as an illustrative motivation, we highlight the importance of two relatively-unexplored topics within the domain of digital asset protections - (1) vendor management, and (2) worker adherence to standard, well-codified procedures and technologies. We explicitly consider each of these topics through the separate empirical efforts detailed in this dissertation. Our first empirical effort examines the effects of sourcing and location decisions on the confidentiality of digital assets. We frame our study within a product-development dyad, with a proprietary, digital asset being shared between partners. We treat confidentiality as a performance dimension that is influenced by each organization accessing the asset. Specifically, we empirically investigate the realm of electronic video game development and the illegal distribution activities of these products. We employ a series of web-crawling data collection programs to compile an extensive secondary dataset covering the legitimate development activities for the industry. We then harvest data from the archives of a major, black-market distribution channel, and leverage these data to derive a novel, product-level measure of asset confidentiality. We examine the interacting factors of industrial clustering (agglomeration) and national property rights legislations in affecting this confidentiality m (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Gray (Advisor); Kenneth Boyer (Advisor); James Hill (Committee Member); Elliot Bendoly (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Electrical and Computer Engineering

In recent years, with the explosive increase of the wireless communication and consumer electronics products, the advanced system solutions which have powerful computation capability and multi-functions are in great demand in the market. Among the various solutions, System on Chip (SoC) is being widely exploited due to the fact that it has the highest level of integration of a large quantity of reusable intellectual property (IP) blocks such as microprocessor, memory block, interface block, RF block, and power management blocks. The success of a SoC design mainly relies on the available reusable IP blocks provided by the IP vendors. Given the trusted reusable IP blocks, a SoC system can be delivered to the market in a very timely way. Therefore, both powerful computation capability with multi functions and great productivity can be implemented at the same time by using SoC. However, the quality assurance of the reusable IP blocks is vital to the successful SoC design. In this dissertation, we analyzed and developed trusted Low Dropout Regulator (LDO) models for intellectual property (IP) reuse aiming at system verification. The LDOs were designed with TI (Texas Instrument) Analog System Lab Kit (ASLK) Pro kit and verified by using TI TINA simulation tools. Based on the performance of the LDOs, high level models of the LDOs in MATLAB are given for initial system validation. In addition, the Verilog-AMS behavior models are presented to cover the full functions of the LDOs. The correctness and effectiveness of the models are verified under Cadence design environment. The proposed models not only satisfy the reusable IPs quality assurance for SoC application but also indicate the practical issues with the use of building component ICs from ASLK Pro kit. Therefore, they can be used as trusted reusable IP blocks for design and verification of SoC.

Committee: Steven Bibyk (Advisor); Wu Lu (Committee Member); Jin Wang (Committee Member) Subjects: Electrical Engineering

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Media and Communication

Copyright is in theory a neutral legal instrument, but in practice copyright functions as an ideological tool. The value of creative content in culture vacillates between the rhetorical poles of progress and profit within copyright law. This study is an ideographic rhetorical critique of copyright. Ideographs are rhetorical containers of ideology that publics use to define various aspects of culture. Some ideographs are contained within the dialogue of a topic. I argue five terms that make up the ideographic grammar of copyright: public domain, fair use, authorship, ownership, and piracy. The public domain is the space where copyrighted material enters when the term of protection expires. The public domain expresses the ideology that creative material belongs to the people who consume content. Fair use is the free speech exception to copyright law that allows for certain types of infringement. Fair Use is the ideology in which the use of creative work belonging to others must be fairly represented. Authorship is how an author creates content and how an audience consumes it. Authorship is an ideology focused on progress towards the process of creating content as motivated by an author. The question at the center of authorship is who controls content: the author or the public. Ownership takes the question of authorship one-step further by invoking material property. Ownership is the embodiment of the idea that management, control, and profit of copyright are more valuable than original creation. The Corporate Public is focused on ownership of content, because ownership is a legal condition of property where a person or group can profit. Piracy, which appears most often in any discussion of copyright law, is an intentional theft of copyrighted work(s). Piracy is a battleground between content theft and the people who publicly resist copyright.

Committee: Michael Butterworth Ph.D (Advisor); Victoria Ekstrand Ph.D (Committee Member); Joshua Atkinson Ph.D (Committee Member); Kristen Rudisill Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Law; Rhetoric

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Engineering : Computer Engineering

Networks-on-Chip is a recent solution paradigm adopted to increase the performance of multi-core designs. The key idea is to interconnectvarious computation modules (IP cores) in a network fashion and transport packets simultaneously across them, thereby gaining performance. In addition to improving performance by having multiple packets in flight, NoCs also present a host of other advantages including scalability, power efficiency, and component re-use through modular design. This work focuses on design and development of high performance communication architectures for FPGAs using NoCs. Once completely developed, the above methodology could be used to augment the current FPGA design flow for implementing multi-core SoC applications. We design and implement an NoC framework for FPGAs, Multi-Clock On-Chip Network for Reconfigurable Systems (MoCReS). We enable the routers to function at independent clock frequencies, that are dictated by the FPGA place and route constraints, and yet follow a low latency virtual cut-through flow control. With increasing design complexities, power trade-offs play a significant role in FPGA design. We analyze the power consumed in the NoC framework that we have developed on a Virtex-4 FPGA. Through experimental results, we study the various components of power consumed in an FPGA based NoC. We propose a novel micro-architecture for a hybrid two-layer router that supports both packet-switched communications, across its local and directional ports, as well as, time multiplexed circuit-switched communications among the multiple IP cores directly connected to it. Results from place and route VHDL models of the advanced router architecture show an average improvement of 20.4% in NoC bandwidth (maximum of 24% compared to a traditional NoC). We parameterize the hybrid router model over the number of ports, channel width and bRAM depth and develop a library of network components (MoClib Library). Synthesizing an NoC topology for FPGAs from the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ranga Vemuri PhD (Committee Chair); Karen A. Tomko PhD (Advisor); Harold Carter PhD (Committee Member); Wen Ben Jone PhD (Committee Member); Srinivasan S PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Engineering

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2012, Music

In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) released what has been famously known as the first mass-disseminated jazz record. A title change during production led to copyright registration for the B-side of the record bearing the title, “Barnyard Blues.” Due to a labeling error, the record itself displayed the title, “Livery Stable Blues.” The unauthorized release of sheet music titled “Livery Stable Blues,” allegedly based on the B-side song, prompted the ODJB to release its own sheet music titled “Barnyard Blues,” and to file for an injunction against the competition on copyright infringement grounds. In the resultant case, Hart et al. v. Graham, the court determined substantial similarity between the two pieces of sheet music. This finding, coupled with conflicting witness testimonies recounting the compositional process and identity of the song, raised questions about the function of the musical author and his rights to the song as intellectual property. This document is a case study that explores extant court records and period sources to evaluate the ways in which jazz musicians and legal professionals responded to these questions. Such analysis reveals points of contention between the jazz and legal communities with regard to the musical author's rights, rooted in different definitions of the song as property. I propose that in contrast to the author's moral claim in the jazz community that treated the song as dynamic property, period copyright law provided a narrower scope of rights dependent on copyright formalities. Despite the new tangibility afforded jazz by recordings, this restriction limited the legal protection for songs that jazz musicians claimed as their own. As the first significant intersection of jazz and copyright law arising from the first famous jazz record, Hart sheds light on what would become points of contention between the jazz and legal communities in future decades. Divergent perceptions of the function of the musical author, t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Graeme Boone PhD (Advisor); Charles Atkinson PhD (Committee Member); Mark Rudoff MM/LLB (Committee Member) Subjects: Law; Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, History

The warfare state is much older than the welfare state. For centuries, the relationship between militaries and the private manufacturing sector has been the most important point of interaction between the state and society. The naval-manufacturing relationship has even deeper historical roots: since warfare at sea has traditionally required much more sophisticated technology than warfare on land, nations have had to invest more money in navies in peacetime. In the late nineteenth century, two developments transformed the naval-manufacturing relationship. First, the intense naval competition preceding World War I increased the pace of technological change and the need for peacetime investment in naval technology. Second, the Second Industrial Revolution transformed the manufacturing sector into the industrial sector, and it accordingly altered the nature of military and naval technology. Torpedoes were in the vanguard of both developments. They played a significant role in the arms race before World War I because they threatened to revolutionize naval tactics and strategy. Navies realized that the tactical system built around capital ships primarily armed with big guns might give way to one built around smaller vessels primarily armed with torpedoes. At the strategic level, the ability of smaller vessels carrying torpedoes to sink larger ones made battle and blockade very risky. Given the potential of torpedoes to alter the metrics and application of naval power, navies worked feverishly to develop them before World War I. The sophistication of torpedo technology, however, complicated the task of turning potential into reality. Powered by fossil fuels and made with hundreds of small, steel, inter-changeable parts, torpedoes symbolized the Second Industrial Revolution at sea. Sending a torpedo prototype into mass production without adequately testing it beforehand would produce nightmares of assembly and operation. A robust research and development infrastructure w (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Geoffrey Parker PhD (Advisor); John Guilmartin PhD (Committee Member); Jennifer Siegel PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2007, International Studies - International Development Studies

This thesis discusses interaction between international regimes, concentrating on regime overlap in light of the differentiation between purposes of international regimes. From this wide number of international agreements in the international system, this thesis argues that agreements can be created with different purposes: they can have a self-interest purpose or a moral purpose. These different purposes will be translated into the objectives of the agreements and will influence other characteristics of the agreements. Overlapping regimes gives a chance for countries to engage in forum shopping and choose the institution that best suits their interests. Powerful developed countries will take issues that are of their interest to self-interest purpose institutions and try to keep some issues in moral purpose agreements. These general considerations are going to be applied to a specific case of interaction: the relationship between the TRIPS and the CBD.

Committee: James Mosher (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2012, Political Science

This research examines issues in the U.S.-China trade dispute over China's intellectual property rights (IPR) infringement. The massive scale of IPR infringement in China is a long-term problem that the United States has been dealing with ever since the two countries normalized their trade relations. China's infringement of U.S. intellectual property rights becomes even more salient given the overall background, where the U.S. economy was hit hard by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the country is running an increasingly huge trade deficit with China. American businesses accuse China for losing billions of dollars due to piracy, counterfeiting, and other forms of IPR infringement. This dissertation attempts to answer an important question in the U.S.-China IPR dispute. That is how China's World Trade Organization (WTO) membership has changed the U.S. strategy in handling its IPR dispute with China. It was widely anticipated that China's accession to the WTO could markedly improve the situation of IPR protection, because China would have to comply with the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), and the U.S. could potentially ask the WTO to authorize retaliations against China for its failure of enforcing the TRIPS Agreement by filing a formal dispute with the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism. Based on research of primary documents and interviews conducted with U.S. government officials and business representatives, this dissertation argues that the U.S. did benefit from the WTO during its long battle against IPR infringement in China. However, the WTO by itself is far from enough to address the issue.

Committee: John Rothgeb PhD (Committee Chair); Walter Arnold PhD (Committee Member); Abdoulaye Saine PhD (Committee Member); Stephen Norris PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: International Relations; Political Science