Intellectual property rights are essential for economic activity and growth as they provide significant value to their owners and the broader economy.
Intellectual property regulates copyright and rights related to these. Fundamentally, it protects the creations developed by a person thanks to their intellect, as well as the dissemination or exploitation of said creations and specific investments. It is made up of a series of rights of a patrimonial nature and, for confident owners, also personal, which grant them the provision of the corresponding protected benefit: work, interpretation, phonogram, audiovisual recording, database… In short, it is the basis on which almost all sectors of the cultural and entertainment industries are based.
The Intellectual Property Law 1/1996, of April 12, provides the framework for protecting original creations and providing other benefits.
In the case of copyright, they will protect artistic, scientific, and literary works of all types: novels, poetry, plays, audiovisual works, music, plastic art, video games, computer software, and, in general, any kind of creation. That meets the requirement of originality without requiring any type of formality or registration. However, concepts in mathematics, procedures, operating techniques, or ideas themselves, although not their expression, are excluded.
In the case of related rights, the intervention of third parties other than the authors is protected. This intervention can be, among other things, the interpretation of the work carried out by an artist who may or may not be the same author of it, as well as specific investments such as those made by producers of phonograms and audiovisual recordings or by entities of broadcasting.
IPR-intensive industries are those whose IPR/employee ratio is higher than the average of IPR-holding industries. This means that a sector is identified as IPR-intensive in the EU if, for at least one of the IPRs considered, the number of such IPRs per employee exceeds the average of all EU sectors using that same IPR.
There are currently 357 intellectual property rights (IPR)-intensive sectors identified within the European Union (EU) economy, compared to the 353 identified in the previous study (2019). Of these sectors, 229 (64%) are intensive in more than one DPI.
The study, entitled ” Intellectual Property Rights and Firm Performance in the EU,” confirms the strong and positive relationship between a company’s ownership of different types of IPR and its economic results. It provides a further indication of the importance of IPR for the European economy.
IPR-intensive sectors contribute significantly to the functioning of the EU internal market. They represent more than 75% of intra-EU trade. In total, companies create almost seven million jobs in IPR-intensive sectors in other EU Member States, with the proportion of these jobs exceeding 30% in some countries.
SMEs with patents, registered designs, or trademarks were more likely than other companies to achieve high turnover growth in the following years. Taken together, these studies provide compelling evidence of the positive relationship between IPRs and economic performance, both at the macroeconomic level and at the level of individual firms.
Overall, the report further demonstrates that companies that own IPR are most represented in the information and communication sectors (with 18% of companies in that sector owning IPR), manufacturing (14%), and others. Service activities (14%), as well as scientific and technical activities (13%)