This is a very, very big subject and we don't have very much time to spend on it today.
What I hope to do is give you an overall impression of the sort of things that you ought to be thinking about.
If you're starting up a business and give you an indication of the sort of problems you may encounter along the way.
Businesses today are very different from the businesses of the past,
and a successful business in the modern era, and most of its assets will be totally intangible.
In the old days, of course, people had factories, they had employees,
they had warehouses full of stock, and basically the businesses were very physical indeed.
Now the world has changed and certainly in the UK intangible property, intellectual property has become tremendously important.
And I often say to people that I have no worries about my job because if I don't have work to do, it means the country is finished.
Because UK particularly and most Western countries are highly dependent on intellectual property.
Now what does it mean? Well, the World Intellectual Property Organisation has had a stab at identifying what it is.
It says it's the creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs and symbols, names and images used in commerce.
Well, that's pretty broad. But the real point is this, that it's one thing to have an idea.
It's a very good thing to have a successful idea.
But unless you can protect it, you don't have any property at all.
And that is why we call it intellectual property.
It's going to protect the products of the mind, which otherwise you would just be somebody who had bright ideas.
Now. The sort of intellectual property you may be interested in is going to vary from person to person and from business to business.
And what I would like to do is take you through some of the types of intellectual
property and identify where they may be helpful to you in your business.
And I know some of it won't be of interest to everybody, but it would depend on the sort of businesses you're interested in getting involved with.
I did say this is a very complicated subject. We're going to talk about copyright.
We're going to cover copyright alone. We would have to spend a very long time.
The Copyright Act is almost 400 pages long and we wouldn't even have time to read it today.
But we've got to cover other things too. So I have to apologise that we can't give you everything you want to know.
What I'm very happy to do when we've finished, when we've gone to the launch pad, is I'm very happy to ask answer any questions you may have.
But I think we've got to sort of go through this like an express train now because we have an awful lot to cover.