Hello. We talk a lot and more and more about the industrial property. These are the battles between Apple and Samsung, for which Samsung was ordrered to pay one billion dollars to the United States of America. These are the 6,500 Nortel patents which were redeemed for 4,5 billion dollars. These are also the Lepine awards. For a start up, for a project leader, is the intellectual property a real issue? You will see that not only big companies are concerned but also the smaller ones. What are we talking about? Intellectual property, patents, brands, design rights. Copyright is a right to property. And, a right to property is like the ownership of your flat, for example. This right of property gives you the right to prohibit, the right to forbid someone else to use it without your consent. And this right to prohibit also allows you to trade it, sign agreements, to rent it, if it is a flat, to grant licences, if it is a patent, of a brand, a design, to transfer it. And it is also the industrial property, it is also a tool to clarify the relations with third parties, with scientific partners, industrial or business partners. It makes it possible to determine what belongs to you before engaging in a partnership, and the relations that you must establish with your subcontractors, with your partners in collaborative innovative projects. The industrial property is also often represented as a weapon. This comparison can be seen as being a bit harsh, a litlle bit unpleasant. But remember the old saying of the Romans: if you want peace, prepare for war. The industrial property is also the tool to be able to develop a company project safely, ensuring that everyone's position is respected. Now, let's give some more details. How can a company, a project leader use the industrial property? To correctly use the industrial property, you must develop two types of skills. The first one is to be able to identify what is potentially protectable. The second skill it to determine wether what would potentially be protectable deserves to be protected, devserves to make us spend a few euros, or even a few thousand euros. And finally, people think of the industrial property for its results, its own creations, but you musn't forget about your competitors, they also have industrial property rights, you musn't only protect your own realisations, but also ensure to respect, to take into account the ones of your competitors. Identifying what could potentially be protectable requires to already know the playing rules. In the next unit, we will explain in more details how patents, brands, design right and copyright work. Patents require to know what is patentable and under what conditions. For example, to know that the patent musn't be considered before any first disclosure to a third party. Then, when you know the rules, you must also be able to apprehend what corresponds to the cretaria of inventive activity. It is not always easy to be an inventor. The inventor asks the question while he already got the result. Out of modesty and often by a lack of overview, he will naturally tend to consider that, in the end, the result was not that complicated, that anyone working in this field could find it. He is his own baseline. The inventor is often in the same situation as when you are a child and someone asks you to solve a riddle, a charade. Once you have or you've been given the solution, you tend to say that it wasn't that complicated, that it was the easiest thing in the world! While a few minutes ago, you couldn't find a way to solve this riddle. So beware, inventors, of your trend to underestimate what is potentially patentable. But once you've determined what is potentially patentable, you musn't have a patent fever and register patent after patent. You know that it costs money, so the decision of protecting what is potentially patentable must be done wisely. It must be wisely done in relation to the aims of your company. Is your goal to raise funds? In this case it is important to check if what is potentially patentable makes it possible to constitute a range of patents that will reinforce your case file in relation to investors. Are you a research office or a private research centre which will grant licences? In this case the opportunity to register a patent will appear according to the capacity of the patents to grant new licences. Is it about intimidating your competitors, or even companies which are much more powerful than you? Then, it can be a justification if it can be verified that, indeed, the invention that you realised allows you to register a patent that fills this goal of intimidation. Small companies often tell me "meh, it is useless for us, because anyway our "patents won't be respected. "We won't be able to do a judicial litigation." Think again. Often, when I give advice to big companies, I would like you to be a mouse to ear the way we start speaking about it. They act a little bit like an elephant scared of a mouse. You should know that a company, whatever its size is, never likes to take juridicial risks and will repect the patents held by third parties, even if they are smaller. However, patenting won't let you rest on your laurels for 20 years. It is illusory. Today, the best protection stays speed. Speed of your market deployment and speed of the regeneration of your products. If you don't go faster to take over the space, your market, sooner or later competitors will do it instead of you. Industrial property will, at best, be used to slow down a little the bench of competitors, hold their fervour back so you have more time to take over the place and to have a head start again with this innovation and creativity policy. To summarise, for a small company, for a project leader, there is an essential issue: to know the playing rules of the industrial property to be able to build your own industrial property policy knowing how to distinguish, in what constitutes the project of the company, what is potentially patentable, to build a patenting policy that is adapted to the means and projects of the company, and never forget that the best protection is speed.