[SOUND] Welcome everybody to this first session of the Patenting in Biotechnology course that we are all participating in. On this first session, I will be talking about intellectual property. I will give you some definitions of intellectual property, what kind of different intellectual property we have and exists. We're going to talk about it. Most importantly we're going to focus a little bit more on patents because most of the course will be involving patents and we need to explain to you from the beginning what these are. In order to talk about patents we have to also describe what are inventions. We have to define an invention compared to a discovery or other things. We need to talk and I will explain what are the patentability conditions for an invention. So when can you actually patent your invention? And last but not least, and a very important part of this whole field, is to mention the destruction of novelty, which we will see is a very important and crucial part of our life as biologists. How not to destroy a novelty, and how not to interfere with our patentability and of our inventions. So first of all, what is intellectual property? So intellectual property is a term referring to creations of the intellect. Very important, this intellect for which a monopoly also very important, is assigned to designated owners by law. So what does this mean? In terms of layman's words, what does it mean? So this means that if I invent something and I come up with some invention, the state or the government or the states where I'm be, will give me a temporary full rights and exclusivity and I put it in bold and circulate. For any creation of a mind, for anything that comes out of a mind and that can be a physical creation, an artistic creation, a design, or a mechanic or an engineering creation if this creation meets some specific condition. So basically, this state would allow me and would give me complete ownership of this invention for a certain amount of time. During this time I can stop anyone from using, selling, creating, modifying or dealing in any way with intellectual property. What does it mean? This means that if I own intellectual property,if I own an invention you, other person, cannot use that invention for that time of which the state and again, I stress out it's the state, and we go back to this later on why it's important. The state gave me these rights for a certain amount of time, therefore you cannot use my invention without first talking to me. So if you talk to me and you want my invention, I can ask for remuneration. I can ask for money from you in order to use my invention. So that's a very important item, which means I own something and it's mine for a certain amount of time. So what kind of intellectual property do we have? What are the kind of deals I can make with the state? So we have some very common ones, and the most common and most important ones for our field of work and for business in general, we have patents, we have copyrights, trademarks, designs and trade secrets. So these are the most important ones and those are the ones that we are going to discuss a little bit with as I said, a big focus on the patents. So first of all, before we go to description of this intellectual property rights, this different kind of methods we have. So we want to talk about why it is so important for business to have intellectual property? What is the point? Why do we have all this focus on IP right now? So in order to do that we first have to describe the concept of intangible assets. So the description of intangible assets is that it's an asset that lacks physical substance, which means that it doesn't exist physically. It's not physical and usually, it's very hard to evaluate so you cannot evaluate, you cannot put a value on something which is not physical. It includes patents, copyrights, franchises, goodwills, trademarks, trade names. But it also include personnel or people creating something in office, something that can now be used coming out of the mind of people. So in the last 40 years, these intangible assets have become really, really important in the world of business, and they've become more and more crucial, and there is more and more investment in companies in creating such kind of assets. Why is that? So let's look at the proportion of tangible, which would be buildings, would be equipment, would be stock, would be inventory, would be robots, would be any kind of physical things that a company owns. The ratio of these tangible assets versus intangible assets in the last 40 years. And we can see that of the S&P 500 which are the 500 more worthy companies in the stock market in the US. We can see in 1975, the intangible assets were barely emitted to 17%. If we come back to today, this intangible assets have basically reversed. Now we are at about 84% or 90% of the value of a company. What does this mean? This means that the worst or the value of a company is now way more reliant on what is intangible, on IP or on other things that are not really quantifiable, compared to just basic stocks or robots, or machines or equipment. So that's very important, and that's why we're getting more and more focus on exactly these kind of assets on a company. So what are these different types of intellectual property? So first of all, we talk about patents and we will be talking a lot about patents in this course. That's going to be the main focus of the whole course. We can patent a technical enhancement which is novel, unique, and useful. And we'll go more into this, which basically means that you can patent an invention if it's novel, if it's useful, and if it improves something. If we last 20 years from filing, very important to remember this number. And one maintains the patent with an annual fee which means that every year you have to pay certain fees to maintain this right alive. Second, and also very important, trademarks. Trademarks is a symbol, it's a logo. It's anything that specifically identifies a company or goods or a service or whatever. It's basically some trademark, some logo, some image that will clearly define this. It lasts 10 years, and you can renew it for as long as you want. Every 10 years you have to pay something to the trademark office. Then move to copyrights, which I'm sure that everybody has heard about the concept of copyright which is something, a protection that we would give to some piece of art, some literature, a movie or a song or a composition. You have worldwide protection for the lifetime of the creator plus 50 years. Which this means that if I write a book, I would hold copyrights or my direct descendants would hold copyrights on my book for all my lifetime plus 50 years after my death. And there are no fees, and that's very important. No fees for the maintenance of this. Then we have the design protection which is basically software you can put on ornamental or other appearance of any article. The shape of your cellphone will be covered by design, the shape of you fancy car will be covered by design, the shape of your computer will be covered by design. And that's basically to protect company for a particular shape of this product so nobody can copy it and make it cheaper or use it without putting investment. You have a lifespan of ten years for this, for this design concept and you can renew it once, only for five years after ten years of the first finding. Finally, which is an intellectual property that sometimes people forget about but is extremely important in any kind of business, is a trade secret. And I guess that the name says it all. Trade secret means that it's a secret. You will not disclose it, you will not talk about it to anybody, but that is very useful. In terms of maintaining something that you own, secret to your company, nobody will ever get to know it. If it's impossible to reverse engineering or to find out exactly how to get it, it's going to be a trade secret, because we will see from the other trademarks, you're not bound to disclose that invention or that creation, to anybody. Contrary to patent, as we see later on, where the deal is that the state gives me property of my invention for 20 years, but in exchange, I tell you exactly how I do it. And that we'll talk about later. So that you can keep it to yourself, through your company. One such example that everybody knows about would be the Coca-Cola example. That is a trade secret, nobody knows about the formula. And they kept it secret for about 120 years now. You can keep it as long as you keep it a secret. Name says it all and naturally you don't have to pay fees to anybody because it's something that you own yourself. So there are more different kinds of IPs, which we are not mentioning here because they are not relevant to what we're talking about. But it's very important to remember these ones because later on in the course there are some things that or some issues that we have to talk about where especially trademarks and patents will become very important. But we will be focusing 98% of the course on the patents. So now let's move to the brand name of a company. So you can have all these intangible assets, all this property together. We have seen that they made about 84% of the worth of the company. How do you see that they're alive? And I put here, a logo, that I guess, most of us knows. No? Right now famous beverage, Coca-Cola, and this is just to show that the importance of a brand, the importance of being known out there is crucial for a company. So you can make an example that you are walking around the big supermarket store, and you see the big aisle with your drinks, and you will have some bottles that will grab your attention. You will have this one, you will have other ones. Those are the ones that most likely people will buy because those are the ones that we all know. We all know what they are. So this is the importance of having a very recognizable, how do you say image out there and apart from that this little cartoon here has a worth. You can put a value on this because you can say okay, this is Coca-Cola, this is this brand. We know what they have behind it. We know what the have, what they're worth. And we can estimate that this little logo here is worth about $90 billion. So basically, this represents a company that is worth $90 billion, and you can dig in more, and you can find out that about 70% of this money, which is a huge amount of money are intangible assets. So basically, this is the importance of having this kind of interest property nowadays where you can basically, all the intangible assets you have, all the property you have, which is not physical, can be represented in a logo and give the worth value of that. So we can do that exercise every year we have companies that would work on trying to evaluate the worth of known companies. And if you look at this here, you can look at the top 15 companies and their worth. And actually, we see that is all logos that, and all brands or logos or images that we're already familiar with. But number one I think I don't have to say the name of it. We know what it is. Brand value $250 billion. And again here, estimate might be that about 80% of that is intangible assets. The little apple is worth on itself a lot of money, and then all the patents that they have behind it, all the designs that they have it, all the trademarks that they have it, that's a lot of money that pulls them on for position. And we have, it's all high tech. We have Google, Microsoft, IBM. Those are all companies that we are dealing with day in day out in our lives, and that's why also they're so important. That was why also, they get these huge I'm out of brand value because everybody knows them. Everybody knows who they are. When you need to search for something, where do you go? On the Internet. They actually have words I can I Google it. It basically just shows you how important these things are. So this is just to kind of close this first part of this lecture. Just to let you know that why we need to start looking especially also in biology about those things is that you can make a lot of benefits, not all in terms of money or fame or worthiness with your research. But you can actually help your institution or your company in raising money if you manage to place yourself in a way that people recognize you. So with this, I will close the first session of the class and we'll be looking after this at more details into button. [MUSIC]
