Competing Rationales for Protection of IPRs :
Intellectual property laws give people the right to own and profit from their artistic, scientific and technological creations for a designated period of time. Those rights do not apply to the physical object in which the creation may be embodied but instead to the intellectual creation as such. Countries have enacted laws to protect intellectual property for two main reasons. One is to give statutory expression to the moral and economic rights of creators in their creations and the rights of the public in access to those creations. The second is to promote, as a deliberate act of Government policy, creativity and the dissemination and application of its results and to encourage fair trading which would contribute to economic and social development.
It is generally agreed that knowledge and inventions have played an important role in economic growth of the countries. It can be seen in the economic development achieved by some countries in the 1990s. Additionally the growing importance of intellectual property and the new pattern of global trade provided impetus for forging a connection between intellectual property policies and trade law and led to the inclusion of the TRIPS Agreement as one of the agreements in the framework of the multilateral trade negotiations under the Uruguay Round. The influence and importance of intellectual property is also reflected in the maximization of shareholder value by knowledge-intensive industries.
Intellectual property indeed is now one of the valuable assets in commercial transactions, be it intellectual property licensing, joint ventures, foreign collaborations, manufacturing, purchase or distribution agreements, or mergers and acquisitions. Licences to use patents, copyrights and trademarks, are often combined with transfers of know-how and are increasingly an important term in technology transactions. These licences provide royalty revenues to the owner of the Intellectual Property, and distribute products and technologies to licensees who might not otherwise have had access to them. In such transactions, the licensees may also gain rights to create improvements or derivative works and to develop their own Intellectual Property assets, which can then be cross-licenced or licenced to others. This creates a very productive cycle of innovation and invention and adds to the revenues of the companies.
The World Intellectual Property Report 2011- The Changing Face of Innovation – a new WIPO publication describes how ownership of intellectual property (IP) rights has become central to the strategies of innovating firms worldwide. With global demand for patents rising from 800,000 applications in the early 1980s to 1.8 million in 2009, the Report concludes that growing investments in innovation and the globalization of economic activities are key drivers of this trend. As a result, IP policy has moved to the forefront of innovation policy.
WIPO Director General, Francis Gurry, notes that “innovation growth is no longer the prerogative of high income countries alone; the technological gap between richer and poorer countries is narrowing. Incremental and more local forms of innovation contribute to economic and social development, on a par with world-class technological innovations.”
Intellectual property assets are used not only in business transactions, but are also traded in their own right such as online exchanges for the evaluation, buying, selling, and licensing of patents and other forms of Intellectual Property. The buyers and sellers of intellectual property manage their intellectual property as financial assets just as investors in stocks, options and other financial instruments.
Strong intellectual property rights help consumers make an educated choice about the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of their purchases. Enforced intellectual property rights ensure products are authentic, and of the high-quality that consumers recognize and expect. IP rights foster the confidence and ease of mind that consumers demand and markets rely on.