Research On Intellectual Property: A Service Outsourcing Perspective

The deepening of international division of labor, industrial upgrading and technological progress had promoted the outsourcing of business from productive outsourcing to information technology outsourcing, business process outsourcing and further to the knowledge process outsourcing. The economic globalization, had brought the service outsourcing into full play. Not only this new round of economic crisis held back the developing momentum of service outsourcing, but also the intellectual property related issues become increasingly prominent. This article focused on the intellectual property on the perspective of service outsourcing, analyzed the impact of strenthning intellectual property protection on service outsourcing, intellectual property ownership structure, transfer pricing and the offshore hosting models. The aim of this paper is to offer some meaningful suggestions for both the policy and company strategy.First this article described the developing trend and current situation of service outsourcing in recent years, after which the question of intellectual property rights under the service outsourcing was introduced. In the following part, this article established the model of North-South division of tabor on R&D activities to consider the impact of strengthening intellectual property protection on the South company's services outsourcing strategy. It came to the conclusion that strengthening IPR protection would promote the development of service outsourcing with some policy recommendations being presented; then based on the imperfect contract and property rights theory, it examined the separability of the exclusive right and usable right of the intellectual property, clarified the payoffs of the contract parties under different ownership structure, and discusses the second best situation of the ownership structure with different external conditions being considered. Next this article illustrated the implications, influencing factors, pricing method and the hosting models of the intellectual property's offshoring transference, took into account the cost benefit,devaluation, risk and taxation effects of the intellectual property rights, and discussed the applicability of different offshore hosting models under the actual situation; Finally,this article summarized the conclusion and described its practical implications.