[MUSIC] Let me now introduce you to a colleague of mine, Giuseppe Mazziotti. A European scholar, lawyer and analyst, of one of the most relevant policies largely shaped by the European Union. This is the policy that protects your ideas, as well as the contents you generate every single day; be it in your professional or private life. This may be music, art or merely a comment you just posted on a blog or on Facebook or any other outlet. Giuseppe, we are all tuned up and ready to listen to you. >> Hi, in this class we will briefly look at an area of EU law and policy, intellectual property, which has become increasingly relevant for European economic growth in a globalized economy. We will take into consideration the basic elements of intellectual property, how and why the EU has developed policies in this area of law, and finally, what the biggest challenges for a modern intellectual property system in Europe are. My name is Giuseppe Mazziotti, I am a lawyer, I am the founder of Mediartis in Rome, and I am a fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. In short, intellectual property intends to boost and reward creativity, inventiveness, and to ensure fairness among competitors on the market. Intellectual property is an expression which is used to indicate an increasingly complex and wide bundle of rules on various aspects of human creativity, technological innovation, and trade. Intellectual property grants exclusivity over the use of intangible assets, such as a brand, a technological process, or intellectual creations, such as a piece of music, a sound recording, a movie, or a piece of software. States grant this intangible form of property to authors of creative works, inventors, and entrepreneurs in order to allow them to control and obtain remuneration from uses of their respective works and assets. Intellectual property has traditionally embraced copyright, patents, and trademarks. Let's start by patents. Patents are about technological innovation. Patents grant investors a 20 year exclusive right, which means a monopoly, over the use of an invention. An invention can be either a new product or, more likely, a technological process that can have an industrial application. The most important aspect of a patent is novelty. States assess novelty from the point of view of an expert in a given field of technology. For instance, as a lawyer, I would not be in a position to fairly assess whether or not a chemical process is new and deserves a patent as a reward. A state instead will have to hire a chemist in order to appoint a suitable examiner for such a patent application. Trademarks. Trademarks are commercial denominations,in short, logos, brands, signs. Trademarks are protected for a limited time but on a renewable basis. After registration of a trademark, the owner of the mark is granted protection from uses of identical or similar denominations or brands that might end up confusing consumers about the origin of a certain good or service in a given sector of commerce. Trademarks protect consumers by allowing them to create a safe link between a sign and a product. This is a function that also protects the distinctive character of a sign or a logo and as a result ends up protecting the reputation of a certain product and of a specific entrepreneur on the market. Finally, copyright. Copyright grants creators of artistic and literary works the right to control, at least legally, copying, public performance and public communication of their works for a very long time. In the European Union and the, in the United States for instance, your term of copyright protection is 70 years from the author's death. The domain of intellectual property has grown considerably in the last decades. Its scope has been progressively extended to the protection of new assets, works and technologies. The EU has widely contributed to such an expansion and through the adoption of legislative measures on computer programs, databases, industrial designs and biotechnological inventions.