Intellectual Property

© Chris Dowlen 2002, 2006, 2010 & 2011

Daily Telegraph, 25 November 2010

Finland’s taxi drivers have been ordered by the supreme court to pay royalty fees if they play music when they have a fare on board

Professional Engineering, December 2002

All creative endeavour comes from somewhere

When you are creative, you always build on something else

There is nothing new under the sun

Ecclesiastes 1:9

Adelphi Charter on Creativity, innovation and

intellectual property

RSAAdelphiLondon

13 October2005

• Humanity’s capacity to generate new ideas and knowledge is its greatest asset. It is the source of art, science and economic development. Without it individuals and societies stagnate

• This creative imagination requires access to the ideas, learning and culture of others, past and present.

• Human rights call on us to ensure that everyone can create, access, use and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and societies to achieve their full potential

• Creativity and investment should be recognised and rewarded. The purpose of intellectual property law (such as copyright and patents) should be, now as it was in the past, to ensure both the sharing of knowledge and the rewarding of innovation.

Patents

Design Registratio

n

Trade Marks

Design Right

Copyright

Know-How

Confidentiality

Processes Project Applicatio

n

Assignment

Defence

Design Methods

You own more than you

believe you do!!

Patents

Cover inventions

For how things work

For what things do

Defined

Make specific claim for specific property

Need to make property secure

– ie need to define it carefully and properly

Define in functional terms

Design Registration

Covers appearance, form and shape

Applies to an industrial or hand-crafted item

Can cover decoration, packaging, graphics, typefaces

Must be novel

Must have individual character

Defined specifically

Trade Marks

Cover trading logos

Mascots

Signatures

Names

May cover form if distinctive

May cover ‘intangibles’ if distinctive

Specific and defined

Design Right

Covers an aspect of shape or configuration

Must be original

Must not be commonplace in the field

Automatic

Unregistered

But must be recorded or made into an article

Excludes surface decoration

Notice – no flag!

Copyright

Covers the form in which a work exists, not the idea

Works of art, books, written works, film, sculpture, music…

Can also cover anything needed for the production of a ‘work’ – eg engineering drawings

Automatic

Unregistered

Notice – no flag!

Know-How

Secret

Tacit

May be unwritten

May consist of skills

May not be able to be written or defined well

Cannot be protected

Help! We can’t even see the castle!

Tacit understanding

• Might be part of know how

• Usually (but not always) something you are competent at doing but of which you are unconscious

• May describe a skill rather than an invention, ‘design’ or a recognisable ‘thing’ so may not be able to be put into a form that can be protected easily

Four stages of learning

consciousness

com

pete

nce

1 Unconscious incompetence

2 Conscious incompetence

4 Unconscious competence

3 Conscious competence

Creative commons

• Sometimes called copyleft rather than copyright

• Arrangements made under copyright legislation to adopt public freedom to copy in certain situation

• Aims to enrichen public utilisation of works under specific licence arrangements

Four major condition modules

• Attribution (BY), requiring attribution to the original author;

• Share Alike (SA), allowing derivative works under the same or a similar license (later or jurisdiction version);

• Non-Commercial (NC), requiring the work is not used for commercial purposes; and

• No Derivative Works (ND), allowing only the original work, without derivatives

ProcessesPatents

Provisional patent is free

Fill in application form

Add description

Add diagrams

Add abstract

Add claims

Need to progress within one year

Searches done after payments

Design Registration

Not free

Fill in application form

Add description

Add diagrams

Novelty needs proving

ProcessesCopyright

Automatic

No official process

Design Right

Automatic

No official process

Know How

No-one knows about it

Keep very quiet and don’t tell anyone

Or turn it into something you can protect

Trade Marks

Can register these after they have been in use

Registration process is not free

Mark has to be unique for that class of product

Assignment

Rights can be assigned

Can sell and trade property

Can sell right to exploit property

eg can sell copyright to a publisher

can get royalties from a design or patent

you paying tuition fees gives you individual right to copy my notes!!

Confidentiality

Agreement between parties can be used to keep information confidential

Can use before application for specific registered intellectual property

Generally supported by courts

LSBU assumed confidential

Outside companies involved MUST have agreements in place

Degree show is NOT confidential

Defence

Need to demonstrate ownership:

Deed of patent

Registration document

Trade Mark registration

Publication evidence

Degree show catalogue

Degree show public opening

Date-signed project log book

Need to determine that an offence has been committed

Offence = copying

Was the intent to copy?

How to prove?

How much money have you got?

LSBU Project application

Use patents as vital project information

Read claims VERY carefully

Don’t always need to insist on being newly creative

Use old ideas if they work

Get permission to use public data & exploit existing patents

Work out how to avoid infringing patents

Use non-disclosure or confidentiality agreements

LSBU Project Application

Use hard backed log books for projects

Get log books and drawings signed & dated regularly by tutors

Keep log books after the project

Try to realise the value of your property

Try to see ways to exploit your property

Develop a mind-set to understand your intellectual property

Design Methods1931 Datsun

Copied from Austin Seven without permission!

Design Methods

Imitation = flattery

Japanese learning = copying = mastery

Trawling = understanding what is good and copying (using) good elements with improvement

A way of getting better quicker

Acknowledge sources of inspiration

Trawling

Example of good practice

Why is it successful?

You learn the general principles of good practice

Learning

You apply these general principles in your work

Your work

CopyingPetty, G: How to be better at…creativity: Kogan Page, 1997

Castle drawings from:Paul Torrance: The nature of creativity as manifest in its testingIn The Nature of CreativityEd Robert Sternberg:Cambridge University Press, 1988

R RogersHow to make money from ideas and inventionsKogan Page, 1999

Travers SymonsSchool yourself in the practice of registrationDesign Week, 11 July 2002

Jude CarrollA handbook for deterring plagiarism in higher education:Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, 2002