تجزیه و تحلیل اثر نرم افزار حقوق مالکیت معنوی بر عملکرد شرکت های نرم افزار در کره جنوبی

This paper explores the effect of software intellectual property rights (IPRs) on the performance of software firms in South Korea using the statistics of software copyright registrations and patent applications along with the financial statements of firms. According to our empirical results, R&D and software R&D input has a strong positive effect on the production of software copyrights and patents, and large firms exploit software IPRs better than small firms. We also found that there are quite different trends in the selection of the legal means of protection; firms in the software industry prefer to copyrighting, whereas firms in the manufacturing industry prefer to patenting. In addition, software copyrighting has a positive effect on software revenue and total revenue of firms, but software patenting fails to show a positive effect on software revenue. Consequently, in contrast to the prevailing consensus indicating a high preference for patenting, it is obvious in our analysis that software copyrighting is more beneficial for software firms.

Over the past two decades, the rapid advance of information and communication technology (ICT) has largely relied on technological innovations in computing, networks, and software, which are essential for the efficient performance of hardware. The software industry plays an important role as an industry itself, including the producer of end-user and business software and the provider of computing services. Moreover, software is generally regarded as an indispensable element to other industries since it serves as an overhead capital required to perform core functionalities for efficient production for households, firms, and government organizations. The dependence on software for business, scientific, educational and entertainment purposes has created a highly competitive software industry and has induced a substantial investment of time and money for the creation of software products and services. Software products are typical knowledge-intensive outputs, which require strong legal protection means in order to provide a proper and balanced incentive to the original developer of the software. For the complex characteristics of software, several legal means such as trade secrecy, license agreement, copyright, and patent are applied to fulfill this objective (Robert, 1984). Since each of the legal protection means has created and modified with its original purpose of protection, a protection means only covers a certain aspect of software intellectual property. For example, literal expressions of software are similar to those of literary works, thereby qualifying software for copyright protection. Therefore, copyrights protect source codes, binary codes, and supplementary documents from unauthorized access; moreover, software simultaneously possesses innovative and even inventive technical characteristics qualifying it for patent protection as well. As a result, patents also serve to protect the underlying technological ideas or functionalities of software. One of the key driving factors for a firm's long-term competitiveness and economic growth stems from incessant technological innovations (Porter, 1998). Although not all the firm's innovations and innovative activities can be measured by external indexes such as R&D investment, quality of human resources, published papers and patents, patent statistics is one of the frequently used indexes to evaluate the innovative activities and potential competitiveness of firms (Hall et al., 1986, Cohen and Lemley, 2001, Encaoua et al., 2006 and Schankerman and Noel, 2006). The starting point of our research is the insight that software copyrights might serve as an indicator for a software firm's innovative activity in the same way as software patents do. The relationship between software copyrights and the performance of firms has not been evaluated in literature pertaining to software IPRs thus far. This is mainly due to the scarcity of reliable information on software copyrights in most economies. In Korea, the Computer Program Protection Act was legislated as a derivative law of the Copyright Act of 1987 for software protection, and it implemented an article that encourages the registration of software with the government agency, the Computer Program Protection Committee. Registering software copyrights provides obvious and effective incentives to the original developer of the software. The developer can establish the creation of software and the relevant rights with this process. In addition, in a legal dispute, it allocates the legal power of opposing third parties who may infringe on the copyright. The registration process is quick and inexpensive, and the legality of the resulting protection is beneficial for the registered software copyright. Moreover, this registration process requires rightly working binary files and then it effectively prevents from registering of false copyright. Because of these incentives, many software developers register their copyright with this system. As a result more than 100,000 software copyright registrations have been accumulated during the past 20 years. This study employed the statistics of software copyright registrations data along with patent application data to evaluate the relationship between software IPRs and the performance of software firms. In this paper, we extended the patent production function to software copyrights and evaluated the determinants of software IPR production using the zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) and zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression methods. We then evaluated the economic impact of software IPRs on the performance of firms and determined the legal method that is more effective in enhancing their performance. In view of our limited knowledge, this is the first study that empirically evaluates the impact of software copyrights. Our empirical results indicate that software R&D investment and total R&D investment have a strong positive effect on software copyrights and patents. The software sale ratio, however, shows a negative effect on them, which implies that software IPRs are used in a supporting role to other products and services. There is a difference in the effect on software IPRs production between firms in the software industry and manufacturing industry; firms in the software industry show a positive effect on software copyright production and a negative effect on software patent production, whereas firms in the manufacturing industry show the opposite effect. Large firms, such as subsidiaries of conglomerates and stock exchange listed firms, creates more software copyrights and patents. In addition, software copyrighting has a positive effect on the performance of firms both on software revenue and total revenue, whereas software patenting fails to show a positive effect on software revenue. Consequently, in contrast to the prevailing consensus indicating a high preference for patenting, it is obvious, in our analysis, that software copyrighting is more beneficial to software firms. The paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, we review previous literatures related to software copyrights and patents. Section 3 presents the hypotheses that we wish to test and the methodology that is applied in the paper. We then describe the data employed set out the results of the economic analysis and its interpretations in Section 4. In Section 5, we conclude this paper with remarks on legal protection means and innovative activities of the software.

The legal protection means for software protection are patent, copyright, license, and trade secrecy. These means have developed their unique object of protection, scope, time, and characteristics. They serve the purpose of protecting to a certain level. Software, however, is an industrial product with a technical aspect, a cultural product similar to literary works, and an innovative product with an inventive step. A cumulative, sequential, and gradual technical advancement of the software industry leads to improper results for software protection under the current legal protection means. In this study, we explored the relationship between software IPR activity and firms’ performance by using the ZIP and ZINB regression models fitted to the statistics on copyright registrations, patent applications, and financial statements. A firm's software R&D investment has a positive effect on software copyrights and patents. Moreover, it was evident that preferences for legal protection means differ according to the industry where the firm is involved. Firms in the software industry show a strong positive effect on software copyright and a negative effect on software patent, whereas firms in the manufacturing industry show a higher propensity for patent compared with firms in the software industry. Large firms, such as subsidiary firms of conglomerates and stock exchange listed firms have a positive effect on both software IPRs. In addition, software copyrighting is positively linked with both total revenue and software revenue, whereas software patenting is effective only for total revenue. Thus, we can conclude that software copyright is directly linked to software products or services of software firms, and software patent contributes to firms’ revenue in an indirect manner such as by being part of non-software products. Our results have important implications for the industry and legal policy. In order to encourage software innovations, policy makers should build different software policies for different industries. Firms in the software and manufacturing industries show quite different attitudes to software copyright and patent. This reflects the industry's characteristic features. The economic effects of software copyright and patent are also different. Moreover, it should be considered as a remedy of the copyright system for software to enhance software innovations. As discussed in Mann (2005), the existing copyright system is not well utilized, since it does not provide any explicit incentive to the software developer. Thus, providing more economic and legal incentives to the original developer for registering software copyrights such as the Korean software registering system, strengthens copyright protection and compensates for the current means of legal protection, which contributes better to software innovations. Since we have analyzed a cross sectional data, further studies should be attempted to expand the panel data, which will provide more reliable results and facilitate the observation of the change in the effect of software IPRs over a period of time. In order to gain a better understanding of the economic effect of software IPRs, it would be useful to adopt a productivity index by DEA or SFA methodologies instead of a primitive output measure such as a revenue or a profit.