Hi, everyone. David Hsu.
Got me a session on Intellectual Property and my goal for
this session is to give you an overview of the various forms of Intellectual Property
that might be important to you as a startup entrepreneur.
Now, why is IP important for entrepreneurs in the first place?
Well, the traditional justification for
granting some rights is to really give incentives for innovations.
Let me give you two quick examples.
One example is for you to incentivize you as the entrepreneur to invest your time,
effort, money in innovating,
we want to allow you the time to recoup that investment.
And in exchange for
you, as we'll talk about in patents to disclose the information in some detail.
We, as the government will give you some monopoly patent protection over your idea
to use for a certain amount of time could be particularly important
in the context of, for example, the pharmaceutical industry.
Another form of intellectual property that we'll talk about is the notion of
copyright.
That is the ability to control the distribution of a creative work.
Think about how this could be quite important in the digital age
where it's very costless in some sense of copying,
making another copy of the song or of the computer program.
And so to incentivize you as the originator of a creative song or
computer program, w e want to give you some protection so
that you feel invested in really making that innovation.
Now, what's important is then to realize is that intellectual
property is akin to real property.
Just like a piece of property, a house that you own.
In that, you can sell that property just like you can sell the rights to a patent.
You could lease it out or
license intellectual property much like you would with a real house.
You would put your house on the market for a renter to come and occupy, but
you would still retain ownership or any other type of analogy with real
property and the provision for intellectual property is quite old.
So written write there in the US Constitution,
Article I in 1790 or 1787, as a prevision that allows for
this incentive to really incentivize authors and
inventors to disclose what they've been doing in exchange for protection.
Now, what are the various forms of intellectual property we'll discuss?
Really, three or four different types.
The first is patent protection.
It really allows inventors to exclude others or try to exclude others from using
a protected property for a given duration of time.
After which then, reversed to the public domain.
An example here would be, the cotton gin or the light bulb.
These were method standards of patentability,
which we'll shortly talk about, but after the conclusion of that patent
protection had entered into the public domain.
The second form of intellectual property is copyright.
It allows authors to control the duplication or
distribution of their creative work.
Think about musical lyrics, photography.
This is really, the creative expression that we want to give some protection for.
A third type is trade secrecy.
Here, it allows firms to try to safeguard what they regard as their
commercially valuable information.
So, that's not generally available to everybody.
Examples of this would be business plans, recipes,
methods, techniques, processes,
patterns that really give a firm the ability to out compete others.
An example here would be Kentucky Fried Chicken,
the secret sauce is not protected by any other means, but trade secrecy and
we'll talk about that in little bit more detail.
Finally, there could be speed.
If you know what I knew 18 months ago, it may not be all that important, because
the commercially relevant information could be moving at quite a brisk pace.
And so we'll give an example of that in a context of the semiconductor industry in
a few minutes.
Patent protection, it's the right to exclude others In the United States for
a period of twenty years from the time that you file a patent.
In the traditional justification from the government standpoint
is to really give an incentive to disclose and give a period of time for
you, as the innovator to recoup your investments in the time and
efforts that you put in to coming up with the invention.
And so as a society, we're not literally recreating the wheel,
instead we are standing on the shoulders of giants as we progress in society and
that will have cumulative progress.
In the United States, it's the first to file.
That's true for most of the world.
That's why there's three standards for patentability.
First, it has to be non obvious to an ordinary person who's schooled in the art.
Secondly, it has to be never relative to what's been patented before.
It has to be as well useful.
Now to meet these three standards,
what's explicitly excluded is anything that's naturally occurring.
Any laws of thermodynamics, laws of gravity,
anything that is naturally occurring phenomenon or abstract ideas.
Those are not subject to patent protection.
However, if you as the inventor innovator have genetically modified something?
Come up with a new variety of apple or rose or sheep,
that's not naturally occurring?
That can be subject to patent protection.
Now the inventor in a patent application has to make specific
claims as to what they've done, that's new and novel and
that helps demarcate where the scope or the space of the invention should and
these standards also apply for business methods.
A new way of conducting business.
Some of you will be familiar with Amazon One Click patent.
It's a new way of conducting business and
is true of other ways of conducting business, maybe optimization or
analytics that is a new algorithm, that's not naturally occurring.
