Strategy of the intellectual property development for the period of ...

Certain indicators that the world is in the era of transition towards the new economy are:the strengthening and growth of service sector, proportional decrease of factory workforce, increase in the participation of intellectual assets in the value of products andservices, increase of the share of intellectual property assets in the value of companiesand, finally, the increase of share of economic activities based on the exploitation ofintellectual property assets in the gross social product.2.2 Why is intellectual property important in the “production of knowledge”In the economy based on the use of intellectual property assets, it is understood that thosegoods must first be created, that is “produced”, and must then be made economicallyfunctional to make profit.In the market model of economy, which is based on the private property and privateinitiative, the production of intellectual property assets faces a problem consisting in thefollowing: IP asset is, by its nature, non rival and non exclusive, which means that it canbe used without limits by the large number of people with the impossibility (or difficulty)to restrict the circle of users only to those which economically contributed to its creation.Speaking in the economic terms, marginal expense of utilization of already created IPasset in the conditions of free market almost equals zero. From the point of view ofstatistic efficiency of the market, it is an optimal situation on which the potential ofintellectual property to increase marginal profit is based. On the other side, for that veryreason, the market has the tendency to underachieve in the motivation of homoeconomicus to invest in the “production” of IP assets, which results in the suboptimaloffer of new IP assets. In one word, the problem is reduced to the appropriation of profitfrom the new intellectual property assets. One of the tools of the economic policy areintellectual property rights, which secure to the subject who invested work and capital inthe creation of new IP asset, the exclusive right of its economic exploitation, undercertain legal conditions and with certain legal limitations. Concretely, those forms ofintellectual property are the patent, copyright, plant varieties protection and topographiesof integrated circuits protection. Thus, these intellectual property rights are, as a matter offact, a form of state intervention in the market, which has the aim, by means of limitingcompetition, to motivate homo economicus to invest in the creation of new IP assets.However, having in mind that they limit the competition, the mentioned intellectualproperty rights reduce the static efficiency of the market, which represents a socialexpense for the existence of these rights. Therefore, the economic mission of theintellectual property rights is ambivalent: on one hand, their incentive effect upon thecreation of new intellectual property assets removes the mentioned weakness of themarket unable to do it itself, on the other hand, the limitation of the competition, which isimmanent to these rights, must not annihilate the social value of the new intellectualproperty assets.Naturally, the production of intellectual property assets in a society does not depend onlyupon the efficiency of intellectual property rights as the incentive directed to the privatesector. The state applies also other stimulating methods for the creation of intellectualproperty assets, in particular scientific and technical knowledge. The common feature of4