MGT Notes

Legal Aspects of Managing Technology, 5e, Burgunder, Pg 3

As we saw in the previous post, property protection offered to an individual or business is a motivating factor for them to engage in the activities of developing and maintaining their assets. In the case of intellectual property, an individual or a firm may spend a good amount of money and resources on Research & Development over a long period of time to arrive at a product or service that is better in many respects than what exists currently. If no property protection were present, anyone could reverse engineer that innovation, understand what was done to make it superior and benefit from this knowledge without a significant investment. They may also further the invention to benefit their business by making it incrementally better or cheaper to produce. The further development in the product may be a boon to society since it offers a more superior innovation, possibly made cheaper than in the original instance. Thus, first inventors lose motivation to undergo the expensive process of arriving at the invention in the first place, and they might prefer to wait for someone else to do the hard work. It is in this context that property protection is important for intellectual assets.