How can you protect your creation?
What Protection for My idea ?
WHAT IS AN IDEA
Looking up the word idea in a basic dictionary, one can find several different definitions: 1. Abstract representation of something; 2. Opinion, way of thinking; 3. Original elaboration of thoughts in the artistic and literary domains; inspiration; 4. New conception of something, find, invention.
Ideas can be protected, once they have been materialized, as the result of a human intellectual effort.
European doctrine agrees that intellectual property rights do not protect ideas as such. They cannot be appropriated. Nobody can claim ownership and, thereby, protection of an idea as such, but only its concretisation in the real world.
The material concretisation as such of an idea can certainly benefit from intellectual property rights protection. An idea is materialised when it is perceptible to the senses.
Nevertheless, intellectual property rights demand that specific criteria be met.
In this briefing paper, we are going to analyse to which extent and on which conditions ideas may be protected by intellectual property rights and other forms of protection.
