Intellectual Property

At the moment intellectual property more and more often becomes the main product of hi-tech and “brand” companies.

There are several types of intellectual property including copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, design rights. Copyright covers the expression of ideas such as in writing, music and pictures. Patents cover various inventions. Trademarks are symbols associated with a good, service or company. Trade secrets imply confidential business information. As for design rights, they imply different ways of presenting the appearance of things.

Technological developments have made it cheaper and easier to make copies of information. Piracy of products and ideas have become common in the early 21^st century. Piracy means that someone steals copyrights, trademarks etc. without paying for that. Most software in many parts of the world is pirated. Also the World Health Organization estimates that 10% of all pharmaceuticals available are pirated. Such examples illustrate that this problem is global. Piracy turns out to be a form of organized crime.

At present intellectual property is a major resource of the company in its marketing strategy. This is especially true of companies owing well-known trademarks or working in the market of high technology products.

Patent law protects inventions and gives the patent holder the right to prevent others from participating and practicing the inventions without a license from the inventor for a certain period of time. They can protect the functional features of a process, machine or manufactured item. In other words, patents provide a temporary monopoly to the inventor.

There has always been a set of thorny issues about the patent system:

o Patent holders may capitalize on inventions by suppressing their development (even though these inventions would benefit to public)

o The patent system provides incentives to focus on what is patentable and on developing superfluous (излишний, ненужный) innovations to avoid what is covered by a patent.

What needs emphasis, however, is that a patent only grants the patentee the right to prevent others from practicing the patented invention, not of using it. Sometimes a patent owner can’t use his own invention, because it would infringe on the patent rights of others. For example, inventor Jones patents a device consisted of components A, B, and C. Inventor Smith improves on Jones’s invention by adding D. Smith can get a patent on the new device with 4 components. He can prevent anyone from using the device but he can’t use it because it infringes on Jones’s patent. On the other hand, Jones can’t add D to his device as that would infringe on Smith’s patent. Such situations are very typical.

A trademark is a word, symbol, design, combination of letters or numbers which identifies products and services in the market. Your customer identify your firm with your trademark.

With millions of trademarks already registered in the world, creating a name for your product or service not already in use is becoming more difficult and necessary. When a creating trademark, people often focus on the marketing aspect, spending long time developing a catchy name. However, a registered trademark may already exist that is very similar to the one you choose.

The term most commonly applied nowadays is “brand”. It can be understood as trademarks that gained public recognition and popularity. The main purpose: possibility to distinguish products of one producer from products of another. E.g. the price of Coca-Cola brand – 70 billion USD, Microsoft – 65 billion, IBM – 51 billion, General electric – 42 billion USD.

It means that if you own a big company, then one of the best guarantees of protection of your business is correct registration of your ownership. If you lose control over your company, the new owners will have to either register a new trademark and lose a great share of promoted business, or negotiate with you.

Copyright is an exclusive, legally secured right to publish, reproduce and sell the matter and form of literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work. It is designed to protect an artist, publisher or other owner against any unauthorized copying of his works. Exclusive rights of the owners of copyright are:

· The Right to Reproduce the Work. This the right to reproduce, copy, duplicate or transcribe the work in any fixed form.

· The Right to Derivative Works. This is the right to modify the work to create a new work. A new work that is based upon an existing work is a “derivative work”.

· The Right to Distribution. This is simply the right to distribute the work to the public by sale, rental, lease or lending.

· The public Display Right. This is the right to show a copy of the work directly to the public by hanging up a copy of the work in a public place, displaying it on a website or transmitting it to the public in any other way.

· The Public Performance Right. This is the right to recite, play, dance, act or show the work at a public place or to transmit it to the public.

However, there are some limitations:

Fair use. This is a doctrine which permits the reproduction of copyrighted material for a limited purpose of teaching, reviewing, literary criticism and the like.

Public Domain. This refers to works which are no longer covers by copyright law.

Non-Copyrightable Works. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are ideas.

Problems with intellectual property:

- The inventor for a limited time has the exclusive right to make, use or sell the invention (but sometimes they suppress innovation: General electric used control of patents to retard the introduction of fluorescent lights, which were a threat to its sales of incandescent lights).

- Int. prop. Is one more way for rich countries to extract wealth from poor countries.

- In reality most creators do not actually gain much benefit from int.prop.

- Privatization of government information.

These problems are symptoms of a deeper problem with the whole idea of intellectual property.

BELARUS

Protection of intellectual property in Belarus defined by a number of laws, regulations of the Government of the Republic of Belarus, department acts of the Committee on Copyrighting under the Ministry of Justice.

The basic legislative acts:

- Civil Code of RB

- Law of the RB “On patents for inventions, useful models, production pieces”

- Law of the RB “On trademarks and service marks”

- Law of the RB “On Copyright”

The Republic of Belarus acknowledges the following objects as intellectual property:

o Results of int.prop. (works of science, literature and art; performances and broadcasting; inventions, useful models, production pieces; know-how)

o Individualization means of civil turnover of products, works, or services participants (brands; trademarks and service marks; geographical indications)

o Other results of intellectual activity.

The legislation in the field of intellectual property has been constantly improving.

-

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14