So, welcome to Introduction to Intellectual Property Law. This is part four case studies in IP. What we're going to talk about in this part, is go over some of the strategies that some of the major IP focused companies out there use in order to use intellectual property law to help their business prospects and help their strategies. So we're going to do this by first going over the major forms of intellectual property, a little bit of a review and a little bit of discussion about the different forms and how they relate to strategy. Then we're going to look at three different companies; Apple Computer, General Motors, and Novartis. Each of them in very different industries, very different types of companies, form more different sizes of companies but all of them use IP as a centralizing focus of their business and they use it in very different ways and so it's an interesting way of looking over the way that IP works in the real world and how it can be used by companies to enhance strategy and their approach to business. So, let's review quickly the major forms of intellectual property. The ones we're going to primarily talk about in this part, are copyright patents and trademarks. So, copyright of course is directed to creative works of expression things like books, media products, like songs, movies, TV shows. Copyrighted software is an important component of copyright. Those are the sorts of things that copyright protects. Patents, as you will recall, is primarily focused towards inventions and innovations. Things that are made that have innovative aspects to them and the subject matter can be very broad. Trademarks are related to the building of brands which creates goodwill and thereby investments in product quality. So, a trademark system or a trademark strategy is based around this idea of creating consumer goodwill towards the underlying source of whatever the company or mark is. So, there are advantages and disadvantages then to each of these approaches. So, patent law is strongly enforceable. You can enforce patents in a variety of ways. You can get lots of damages from patents, you can get injunctive relief which is a order by a court to cease doing something, that's a very powerful relief that you can get as a patent holder. The rights can be fairly broad, the way that patent law works is to give a fairly broad scope of rights for a particular invention. Then the rights are relatively clear as well which means it's relatively easy to transact, people can generally understand what the topic of the patent is and therefore you can make a deal, a licensing deal or maybe even a sale of the patent. It can protect your investments in innovation. So, if you are trying to do a research in development project, one of the things that you know or that you can use patents for is to try to get some return on that innovation. Gets some return on that investment by either licensing, maybe selling the patents or maybe trying to enforce the patents against your competitors. The downsides of patents are that they're fairly expensive and time consuming to obtain. Typically somewhere the neighbor had three years to obtain they can cost anywhere from $8 to $50,000 depending on how complex they are to obtain a single patent. The enforcement can also be quite costly. It can take years to litigate a patent, it's very time-consuming, costs a lot of money to litigate a patent. One of the most complex and costly areas are the US legal system, the process of screening that we have in the patent system by which I mean the patent office means that obtaining rights is not clear. So even if you have an invention, it may well be that you can't get a patent on that invention because perhaps there's somebody else has already invented it or there could be other defects in your application process that would cause you to not get the invention so it's not a sure deal. Then the term is relatively limited in the patent context 20 years from the date of filing which might be good enough for certain kinds of products computer software for example, maybe even computer hardware but other kinds of products for example pharmaceutical drugs or chemicals, it may not be long enough to fully recoup the investment. So, those are the pros and cons of patents. Trademarks have pros and cons as well. Trademarks are easy to obtain. You can register them in order to get greater protection but in general if you start using a mark, you can have it as a trademark. You can protect some specific types of investments. So intangible goodwill type assets, the good feelings that the consumers have towards you or your product or things that you can protect with a trademark. Trademarks are quite effective at protecting against sort of the knock-offs, sort of the straight copying of your goods and services that might otherwise be more costly or more difficult to protect under the other areas of IP. The downsides to trademarks is that the rights are relatively narrow, they are limited to just what you have branded yourself as or what kind of brands you're going to use or some expansion of that. But really it's pretty focused on the types of things that you build your brand in and it doesn't go much further than that. Enforcement can also be pretty costly, less costly than patents it doesn't require as much discovery, the types of experts that you would have to hire aren't as costly but it still can take quite a long time and the substantial outlay of resources in order to protect your trademark. Then again the screening process here means that even if you have a brand or have a mark that you've been using, you are not entirely certain that you're going to get that trademark, there's a screening process and it may be that somebody else has used it or use something similar enough that you're not going to get it, so it's not entirely a sure thing. Copyrights, like trademarks, are very easy to obtain. You create a expressive work and you have a copyright essentially automatically. Now there are advantages to doing things like marking your copyright and registering your copyright in terms of your ability to enforce but in terms of actually getting the underlying copyright they are essentially free. If you make the good, make the creative work you get a copyright. It's good at creating at, sorry, at protecting creative work and particularly entertainment type works TVs, movies, those sorts of things are well protected by copyright and good at protecting against exact copying. The rights that you get as a copyright are the strongest when what somebody has done is sort of directly copied some piece of creative expression that you had made. The rights however, are pretty narrow and there are a lot of defenses to copyright that would allow people who are even using your exact creative work to potentially not be liable for copyright infringement. So that means that it is not certain that you can always get the copyright enforcement that you might expect. Again, like the other areas of intellectual property rights, the enforcement scheme can be pretty costly. It can take years to litigate copyright cases they'll require expert witnesses to testify as to whether or not an associated good is close enough, is substantially similar as we would say in the copyright context to your good. All of that takes time, money, and can diminish your ability to protect your rights. So, if we sort of lay all of this out into sort of what I would call a strategy chart, this is sort of the way that I think about it. So, if you look at four sorts of categories that you might think about if you're thinking about IP strategy, how long is the protection lasting? So how, once I get the right how long does it last? How costly is it to actually get that protection? How broad are the rights once I get the protection and then what kinds of things can I cover with that IP right? So, in patents you have a relatively short length of protection, it's expensive to obtain, the rights are quite broad, and the subject matter is quite broad anything that you can sort of characterize in it as an adventure. Trademarks, have a very long length of protection, potentially perpetual as long as you continue using the mark and people continue to associating the mark with the underlying good or service that you're providing, not very costly to obtain less so than patents it's not as rigorous as screening process but it is a screening process, so it costs some but not as much as patents. The breadth of rights is not particularly strong, it's really or not as broad as patents anyway, it's really limited to what exactly you have obtained and what types of investments you've made and then the type of coverage is fairly narrow, so it just marks is pretty much it. You can get some coverage for design as long as people understand the design to be distinctly related to the underlying good or service but really you're just talking about marks and branding their. Copyrights, the length of protection is also very long, life of the author plus 70 years sometimes even more if it's a corporate author, it's again almost free to obtain you automatically create a copyright there is some expense involved if you want to register the copyright but even then they expense is very low. The rights are not very broad, you have to pretty much show copying of your exact work of creative expression and even then there are lots of defenses. Then the type of coverage is pretty narrow because you're really are limited to those creative works of expression that you yourself have made and distributed. So, if you sort of think about your business model or your strategy for business and how the types of products or goods or services that you're offering fit into these categories, that may give you a guide for how to use these IP rights to the best available opportunities.
