Business Law

IV.

IP LAW

Intellectual Property in the Global Marketplace (excerpt from GuJ'f IERMANN-ANDERSON, Intellectual property in global mnarkets a guide for foreign lawyers and managers, L-ondon, 1997)

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Intellectual Property in the Global Marketplace

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1.1 Introduction Recently, a new set of assets, denominated as "knowledge" and "innovation," have moved to the forefront of business strategy for both large and small enterprises around the world. This new factor of production, often referred to as technology that has competitive significance, has joined capital and labor as a key element of economic activity. The use of this term connotes a set of tangible assets that can be used by its owner and, like any other type of asset, may be susceptible to obsolescence, misappropriation, and duplication. However, the legal framework that has been constructed to contain, define, and allocate ownership and control of these technological assets, in the form of patent, trade secrets, copyrights and trademarks, and other types of intellectual property, provides an owner with far more that a set of property rights. Instead, technology rights provide a tool that permits the owner to forge and maintain an overall competitive advantage based, in part, on the ability to use, and prevent others from using, the valuable innovations and ideas that meet the requirements of law around the world. 1.2 Types of Intellectual Property Rights

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The major types of intellectual property rights that are recognized around the world are patents, which are used to protect new inventions; trade secrets, which recognize the value of proprietary business information; copyrights, which are used to protect books, records, and other tangible forms of creative work from unauthorized copying and misappropriation; and trademarks, which protect the distinguishing words and symbols developed by firms to identify their goods and services in the eyes of consumers.

Patents

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