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This is a very, very big subject and we don't have very much time to spend on it today.

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What I hope to do is give you an overall impression of the sort of things that you ought to be thinking about.

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If you're starting up a business and give you an indication of the sort of problems you may encounter along the way.

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Businesses today are very different from the businesses of the past,

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and a successful business in the modern era, and most of its assets will be totally intangible.

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In the old days, of course, people had factories, they had employees,

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they had warehouses full of stock, and basically the businesses were very physical indeed.

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Now the world has changed and certainly in the UK intangible property, intellectual property has become tremendously important.

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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.

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Because UK particularly and most Western countries are highly dependent on intellectual property.

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Now what does it mean? Well, the World Intellectual Property Organisation has had a stab at identifying what it is.

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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.

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Well, that's pretty broad. But the real point is this, that it's one thing to have an idea.

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It's a very good thing to have a successful idea.

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But unless you can protect it, you don't have any property at all.

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And that is why we call it intellectual property.

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It's going to protect the products of the mind, which otherwise you would just be somebody who had bright ideas.

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Now. The sort of intellectual property you may be interested in is going to vary from person to person and from business to business.

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And what I would like to do is take you through some of the types of intellectual

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property and identify where they may be helpful to you in your business.

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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.

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I did say this is a very complicated subject. We're going to talk about copyright.

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We're going to cover copyright alone. We would have to spend a very long time.

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The Copyright Act is almost 400 pages long and we wouldn't even have time to read it today.

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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.

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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.

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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.