Celebrating Innovation
The Wright Brothers. Steve Jobs. Louis Pasteur. Pablo Picasso. Marie Curie. What do they all have in common? They are all being celebrated as "visionary innovators" during 2012's World Intellectual Property Day.
World IP Day is celebrated annually on the 26th April, and this year is no exception. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) chose this day to celebrate and promote the understanding of the role Intellectual Property plays in our day to day lives. The date chosen is significant in that it was the date on which the WIPO Convention came into force in 1970.
This year's celebration focuses on innovation and cultural creation and celebrates the work on "visionary innovators" – people who transform our lives by their creative and innovative contributions.
Not long ago, the Director General of WIPO was here in Malta celebrating that very fact during the Malta Innovation Awards and Malta Artisan Honours ceremonies. In his message on World IP Day Gurry also talks of the extraordinary human lives and stories behind major innovations and their impact on society.
It is innovation which propels us forward. From the manufacture of paper to the advent of Cloud computing, mankind has come a long way. Innovation has given us communication technologies, new and more advanced medicines, medical devices (we can be proud to say that a team of Maltese innovators is excelling here with the creation of "smart stents"), green energy solutions, computer technology, art, music, and architecture to name but a few.
At the heart of all this is the creator, the author, the innovator; the person who has put all the time, dedication, energy, and the creative spark to produce that special product.
Whether it is the launch of the latest iPhone or Porsche, or research in break-through technology for clean energy, or the latest blockbuster 3D film, the nucleus of this flurry of activity is always the creative work. Or rather, the creative worker.
Wherever it is you work, be it in a design studio, a lab, or if you write music, take photographs, are a sketch artist or a writer – in every case we are dealing with work which can be commercialised, sold, licensed out and exploited. It is through the use of intellectual property rights that this exploitation can occur, since third parties need to acquire the rights or the necessary permissions to use the work.
The spectrum of intellectual property rights encompasses all aspects of human innovation. Starting off with Copyright, this protects artistic, literary, audiovisual, musical works and databases. And it is not only authors who are protected but also performers, producers and broadcasters. Copyright protection is one of the longest serving IP rights, which protects works for the life of the author plus seventy years following the death of the author. Trade marks, on the other hand, protect brand names and logos. A trade mark is used as an identifier of the source of the product. As we have discussed in previous articles, trade marks are now protecting not just conventional names and logos but also colours, packaging shapes and sounds. This is allowed as long as the marks form that all-important link in the mind of the consumer between the product and the producer.
Designer rights are specifically targeted to protect the appearance of goods. The European Union harmonisation effort for designs has made it possible to benefit from an unregistered design right for three years but gain better and more targeted protection by having a registered design right which lasts for up to 25 years. And finally there are patents. Patents protect inventions and are extremely technical rights attached to innovation. A patent will protect a product as long as it is novel, is the product of an inventive effort, and must be capable of industrial application. Many consider patents to be the epitome of the term "industrial and intellectual property rights" due to the strict requirement for the patented object to have industrial applicability.
All in all, intellectual property rights accompany us in everything we do in life. And now there is talk of a "new" breed of IP right: geographical indications of origin. These are already protected rights but there is discussion, also at EU level, to "upgrade" them to a fully fledged intellectual property right. Geographical indications of origin are the appellations such as "Feta", "Parmiggiano Reggiano", ""Parma Ham", Port" and "Champagne". It is interesting to see which new areas intellectual property will open up during this lifetime, an innovation in itself!
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