Agnès INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Intellectual property (IP) is a topical issue related to many lawsuits and there is an abundance of measures that need to be implemented in order to regulate it. The articles proposed in the business law booklet are tackling trademark, copyrights and patents. I will comment on them and illustrate with my essay with recent examples of intellectual property theft. What my essay will show you is that there is usually no clear moral victor in an IP disagreement as cases are not always as they seem especially when large amounts of profits are involved. In the article "What is intellectual property?", the author describes the key forms of Intellectual Property: Copyrights, Patents, Trade Secrets and Trademarks. Here I'm focusing on the concept of idea because everything concerning IP is the result of an initial idea. Pablo Picasso, one of the most famous artists of the past century once said: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal". Why would a man who revolutionized the artistic world promote plagiarism? I was perplexed the first time I've heard this quote so I tried to find some interpretations and I think that I've understood what Pablo Picasso meant. The best interpretation I've found was that a good artist finds inspiration in nature and they aim at representing a subject, as it exists in reality. But a great artist will steal this subject and make it his own in order to "make it more deeper and meaningful". Today, we can apply this theory to the big existing firms and start-up companies. To settle a new business, one shouldn't be attracted by the success of those big companies but by their creative image. To cope with market competition, the entrepreneurs have to find a common theme among successful companies and evolve it into something that fits them. If the entrepreneur takes possession of fundamentals he was attracted to, and not only copies it, then he will be able to let his imagination work and make the project evolve. This