Achieving Safe Marketing that Adheres to Intellectual Property
Part 2: Intellectual Property in the Marketing Context
The Statute of Monopolies 1624 (the origin of patent law) and the British Statute of Anne 1710(the origin of copyright) have always been considered as the founding laws of intellectual property as we know it today. The British legal debates in the 1760s and 1770s referred to intellectual property as “literary property” and it covered the protection of author’s and publisher’s work under the common law of property.
In this article, we will cover the main international intellectual property laws and regulations and how they influence marketing efforts. Organizations such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have been working on establishing an enforcing these laws all over the world (193 states).
- The Relevance of Intellectual Property Rights in the Marketing Context
Intellectual property is vital to marketing as it creates the best environment for it. The differentiation that every marketing campaign seeks to highlight in the product or service that it promotes is the founding pillar of intellectual property rights. This is simply because differentiation from existing products or services is the main characteristic that gets most intellectual assets the protection of the law.
When it comes to compliance, many marketing researchers argue that companies are supposed to avoid investing in markets where they would compete with a company that owns intellectual property rights. In this context, intellectual property rights execute the function of deterring potential competitors from entering their respective market. However, it’s important to note that the influence of intellectual property rights differs from a market to another. For example, this function can be highly significant and powerful in the pharmaceutical industry as each product is protected by a single or a few patents. On the contrary and in the electric appliance industry, the same function would be weak because products in this industry are protected by a significant number of patents.
- The Usage of Intellectual Property as a Product
For the last couple of decades, the usage of intellectual property as a product has been growing significantly. The concept allows companies that have the intellectual property right of a certain product to use it as an asset and make a monetary profit out of it. Assigning or licensing intellectual property rights allows the buying party to use the protected product or service in their manufacturing or marketing activities.
Through this article, we wanted to highlight the development of intellectual property both as a legal and economic concept. We wanted to explore the shift from using intellectual property rights to deter competition from using the same kind of intellectual property rights as a product.
In the following articles, we will explore the main topic of this series and explain how intellectual property can be used as a marketing tool. At the same time, we will also state how to shape an intellectual-property-compliant marketing strategy.
