Intellectual Property Rights

“Creativity is one of the highest forms of human energy. It is a defining human trait that enables us to design and to use tools, and it gives us the ability to solve problems. In the modern world, creativity and its outcome – innovation – are credited as the greatest predictors for economic advancement, equal to or surpassing investments. Creativity can be a vehicle for empowerment and fulfilment or, if denied or abused, it can lead to frustration, apathy, alienation, and even violence. The role of creativity has been magnified by the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies. ICTs are the most powerful means to produce, preserve and communicate the fruits of human creativity, including information, know-how, knowledge, and works of art.” (*) (*) ICT and Creativity: towards a global cooperation for quality contents in the Information Society – The Vienna Conclusions 2005 Creativity is one most significant assets of the human kind. Creativity makes the difference between humans and other creatures, human creativity is probably powerful and pervasive. Human may express creativity in different ways with different media so we enjoy musicians, composers, singers, painters, sculptors, actors, movie directors, architects, industrial designers, writers, engineers, ...., computer scientists and more. All of them are able to “add” something special to a simple mix of common ingredients: lines, notes, colors, words, instructions etc. The element they “add” it should be named “brain juice”, it is due to their own intellect. In such a way creativity is the inner engine of innovation. Of course creativity does not start usually from “tabula rasa ” it takes into account and is influenced by the cultural background and previous experiences and “products”. All this happens voluntarily or involuntarily. Painters create their own style, even the most “break through” one, starting from the “elaboration” of the existent ones. Composers are frequently influenced by other artists as well as architects and industrial designers. Obviously speaking about innovation and inventions it is a common understanding that no one use to sit down and think: Now I will invent something that does not exist at all! Sometimes the recipe includes part or a set of parts of already existent “objects”. From time to time it happens that the original aim of the invention or research is not exactly or at all the real one on the market. Trying to better the efficiency of water pumps it happens to invent steam engines, researching on “peer to peer” secure wireless communication meet a “bug” later on called “broadcasting”, trying to help to solve the problem of deaf invent one of the most significant and pervasive “object” of the twentieth century: the transistor. Major part of the times the “quid” due to creativity and innovation capacity is disclosed to the public as soon as the “creation” is available to the people. The “disclosure” of the artifact inspires other “authors” enabling them to go one step beyond or just to clone it. It happens every day in every field: music, painting, engineering, architecture, industrial design etc. It is a common understanding that creative people (and companies) invest time and resources in order to make some progress. Productivity and return of investment in this field are not easy to estimate, we can simply refer to average figures. Of course there are differences amongst painters, musicians and scientists. Here it comes the dilemma: do we consider such achievements human kind advances and in some way patrimony of the humanity freely accessible and reusable by anyone or do we consider more wise to protect it as the result of “personal” investments and efforts? And more in detail: how intellectual property laws might embrace the apparently paradoxical goals of motivating individual creation and preserving the ultimate benefits of that creation for the common good. This chapter provides an overview on Intellectual property rights and related subjects including some approaches to IPR protection management and privacy.