Intellectual property

Intellectual property is an exclusive right conferred by the right to the author of a work (literary or artistic property) or of a technical invention (industrial property), which allows the latter to prohibit others from duplicating this which it produced without its consent.

This exclusive right thwarts the competitive system, in which copying is ordinary behavior, a form of circulation, of increasing wealth, a situation conducive to innovation. Tensions are therefore strong between competition Law and intellectual property and competition authorities tend to see abuses of a dominant position where, for example, pharmaceutical companies believe that they are claiming the use of their intellectual property rights. Digital technology gives rise to theoretical and practical confrontations of the same magnitude.

But if intellectual property is inserted intellectually into the Regulation, the State no longer grants this exclusive right ex post to reward the author for having created or invented. In a more dynamic and global way, intellectual property is for the State an incentive public policy tool to lead economic agents to innovate with the prospect of receiving the financial fruits increased by the absence of competition for several years.

For example, currently in the field of patents, economists only see them as part of a state-led policy.

It is undoubtedly still different in matters of literary and artistic property which remains with a more romantic vision of an artist whose mainspring is not the lure of gain but the desire for the beautiful and whom it does not suit. to encourage creation. This has undoubtedly affected the prospect of creating industries in the cultural sector. Digital technology is converging the two schemes, perhaps towards the same obsolescence.