Literary and artistic works, industrial innovation, biotechnologies and digital creations form the wealth of both the present and the future, and are essential to building, developing, sustaining and enhancing the value of businesses.
These companies are diverse and span both traditional and emerging industries, including pharmaceuticals, software publishing, and entertainment. For all these organisations, fostering creativity and innovation must be complemented by a thorough understanding and implementation of effective legal protection. This protection is provided through intellectual property rights.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property refers to the vast array of private rights, such as patents, copyright, copyright-related rights, design rights, plant variety rights, trademarks and the rights of protected geographic indications. These protect, on one side, creations of the mind (such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs and models, new plant varieties, phonograms or videograms) and, on the other, distinctive signs, (such as trademarks, geographical indications, variety names and domain names).
Intellectual Property, which is essential to businesses and, more broadly, to social, economic, technical, artistic and cultural development, is deployed both at a national level (with national intellectual property rights that can be obtained, for example, from the National Institute of Industrial Property or the National Plant Variety Authority), and at a regional level (European Union with the European Union trademark, European Union designs, Community plant variety protection and European Union geographical indications – PDO, PGI; European Patent Organisation with the European patent and the European patent with unitary effect) and an international level (with, for example, the international registration of trademarks under the Madrid system or the international registration of industrial designs under the Hague Agreement).
Contracts (including licence agreements, assignment agreements, knowledge transfer agreements, and research agreements) remain an essential tool for managing and exploiting intellectual property rights.
Personal Data Protection
Our society has entered the Digital Age. It has gone digital in all areas, and there is a huge amount of data and IT records relating to each individual. Some of this data is extremely sensitive (relating to such issues as health, religion, and political opinion).
The existence of this data represents a danger to both individuals and their fundamental rights and freedoms. This is due to the new computing power of IT resources, profiling techniques, control and algorithmic cross-checking tools, artificial intelligence, the spread of cyber-attacks and the existence of the darknet as a place where for exchanging hacked data.
In order to uniformly guarantee the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals in processing their personal data, the European Union has adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Regulation EU 2016/679 of 27 April 2016 relating to the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and to the free movement of such data.
All operators who process personal data must voluntarily comply with the requirements of GDPR. A number of checks and formalities must be carried out to ensure compliance with GDPR and to document compliance with GDPR so that, if necessary, it can be justified at any time.
Personal data is also the new "black gold" of the economy; it has an undeniable economic value, is essential to the development of the digital market as well as to the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. In this perspective, GDPR also considers personal data to be a commodity that should be allowed to circulate and be used freely.
Contracts remain the best way of organising the circulation and use of personal data, while always complying with the obligations imposed by GDPR.
In all these areas of intellectual property and personal data protection, our firm can help you assess the protection that should be put in place or that already exists, assist or represent you in the requisite formalities and procedures, organise the management and use of rights under contract, defend your rights against any infringement and manage litigation.
