After claiming Siri intelligent assistant of Apple Inc. infringed on two of its patents, Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) files a suit against Apple Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas for a second time in a year. Because the court rulings are usually in favour of patent holders and the compensation awards are higher, that has apparently chosen by NCKU.

According to this lawsuit, NCKU has claimed that Apple products using block-orientated motion compensation video compression as embodied in the ITU-T H.264 Standard, including Apple FaceTime video-chatting feature, QuickTime, and other fruity software infringe one of the US Patent 7,561,078, an encoding system for a video data set . The encoding system includes a coding strategies represented as a tree-based structure, When one of the strategies are obtained, the structure have better performance comparing to the related art.

As with the previous lawsuit, NCKU sued company's use of Siri and voice-to-text functionality. This time NCKU has claimed that due to company’s willful patent infringement to have suffered undetermined amount of monetary damages. NCKU is asking for a permanent injunction against the Apple Inc. to stop selling just about all of its products. By filing the patent infringement lawsuit against Apple Inc, NCKU wanted to set the model to protect the patent rights.

On March 28th, 2013, the Executive Yuan passed the 2014 administrative directions (Draft). The document points to six major goals for next year: (1) Boosting Economic Growth and Employment (2) Strengthening Infrastructure and Narrowing the Urban-rural Gap (3) Helping the Disadvantaged and Advancing Social Justice (4) Promoting Diversified Energy Sources and Building a Sustainable, Low-carbon Taiwan (5) Training Talent and Engaging Citizens in the Humanities (6) Expanding Diplomatic Ties and Promoting Cross-strait Peace. The directions will allow ministries and agencies to draw up their administrative and budgetary plans by the end of August.

For the economic growth, the government will continue to work on the action plans of “Economic Power-Up Plan.” To carry out the initiative on innovative and diverse industries, in collaboration with the “Three Industries, Four Reforms” program (a service-oriented manufacturing industry, an internationalized and high-tech services industry, and a specialty oriented traditional industry), the government will target on turning the SMEs into backbone enterprises, the development of rule-of law on business law and intellectual property rights, and the development of free economic pilot zone (FEPZ). For the energy sources diversification, the government will promote a well-built market mechanism for energy efficiency. Meanwhile, to improve the competitiveness of green energy industry, the government will promote new energy and renewable energy, and accelerate the spread of innovative technological solutions.

Premier Yi-Huah Jiang said, these efforts aim to enhance Taiwan’s international competitiveness, promote environmental sustainability and cultural literacy, and build up a society of rule-of-law.

To promote more liberal and internationalized development of Taiwan economy, Premier of Executive Yuan approved the “Free Economic Demonstration Zone Plan” on April 26, 2013. Meanwhile, an Executive Yuan Working Group on Promotion of Economic Demonstration Zone is set up to accelerate the mapping out of the promotion programs as well as detailed action plans. The first phase of the Free Economic Demonstration Zone is to be officially initiated in July. According to the “Free Economic Demonstration Zone Plan”, the relevant laws and provisions regarding the flowing of human and financial capitals, and of logistics, will be loosen up to a great degree, based on the core ideas of liberalization, internationalization, and forwardness. Other related measures such as offering of lands and taxation would also be made, in order to attract capitals from both the inside and outside of the country.

In addition, the Free Economic Demonstration Zone will first develop economic activities such as intelligent computing, international medicine services, value-added agriculture and cooperation among industries, to accelerate the transformation of the industrial structure of Taiwan. In order to construe an excellent environment for business of full liberalization and internationalization, the promotion strategies will be focused on “break-through of legal frameworks and innovations of management mechanisms”.

To accelerate the promotion process, the Free Economic Demonstration Zone will be conducted in two phases. The first phase is centered on the existing free trade port areas, including five ports and one airport, incorporated with the nature of “being inside the country border but outside the tariff zone”. All the industrial parks in the near counties and cities will also be integrated. The promotion will be set out simultaneously in the north, middle and south of Taiwan. The effects of the promotion are expected to be magnified by fully utilizing the resources and the unique characters of industries of each region. Moreover, the promulgation of a special legislation on the Free Economic Demonstration Zone would be facilitated in the future. After this special legislation is passed, the set-ups of demonstration zones can be applied by authorities either of central or of local government and the related promotion works of the second phase will be unfolded immediately. According to the Executive Yuan, the Free Economic Demonstration Zone will be beneficial in terms of creating positive conditions for Taiwan to participate in regional trade organizations and attract both local and foreign investment, injecting new movement into the economic growth of Taiwan.

Abstract:

This paper mainly discussed a special venture capital fund of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi): High-Tech Grunderfonds (HTGF). BMWi started this fund in 2005 to provide capital to the German high-tech companies in the early stage (the “ seed phase”). HTGF is funded by the government, the KfG bankgroup and the private sector. HTGF invested in those technology-based German companies following the principles of European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. This fund helps academic research institutes and individual to transfer their research result into commercial utilities. Now it is the main capital source for Germany technology-based companies in the seed phase.

Taiwan is seeking for the solution of bridging the so called “death valley” in the innovation ecosystem. It is suggested in the “9th National S&T Conference” that the government should establish an early stage fund to confront with this issue. In this regard, the German HTGF model may serve as a reference example. In this paper, the design concept, the organizational, operational and investment mechanisms of the HTGF is discussed. Moreover, the author tried to analyse he successful factors of the HTGF and pointed out those legal issue when considering the HTGF model.

Keywords: venture capital, High-Tech Grunderfonds, HTGF, public private partnership, spin off, EXIST

<Source: Hui-Hsien Huang, Stimulating S&T Startup through Public Private Partnership—An Analysis of German Model: High Tech Grunderfonds, Science and Technology Law Review Vol. 25 No. 4, Apr. 2013, p.p. 16-39>