This paper discusses “The latest issues regarding trademarks, patents, and copyrights.” It considers companies attempting to patent business plans and life forms, and speculates on where the music business will end up as a result of its inability to protect its copyrighted works that are available on the Internet.

As Pierre A. David discusses in Chapter 5 of International Logistics, business relationships can be complex when they cross national borders (David, 2010, pp. 92-110); in the increasingly globalized business environment, this issue is particularly relevant to issues regarding trademarks, patents and copyrights. For these types of business relationship, the increasing use of technology to both produce and distribute products, and to manage copyright, trademark and patent, has resulted in a disjunction between the benefits of wider distribution and the disadvantage of new difficulties in enforcing intellectual property rights. Two good examples concern the patenting of life forms, and the copyright of music available on the internet.

Issues concerning the patenting of life forms began with Jonas Salk’s invention of the polio vaccine in 1955 (Specter, 2013, n.p.). Since then, the issue has become more complex, with the increasing potential being revealed by research into genetics, and particularly the human genome. In the USA, patents exist on a number of human genes, controlling the research pertaining to those genes; the idea that a human gene can be patented is being challenged in court (Specter, 2013, n.p.). Patents relate to the physical characteristics of a product, such as its function or design (Kroninger, 2016, n.p.). One argument against patenting of life forms, therefore, pertains to the creative involvement of the patenter in making the living organism valuable: thus far, courts have ruled that where a living organism has been modified by the researcher, a patent can be reasonably issued; a good example is the way in which a gene is isolated and purified for research (Specter, 2013, n.p.).

However, a further issue is that by allowing an isolated gene to be patented, research into the possibilities of that gene can be privately controlled, and therefore severely limited. The pursuit of and protection of profits in this situation takes precedence over the moral and human rights issues. While technology has enabled research in this area to open up exciting new business possibilities, therefore, it has also highlighted controversial issues pertaining to the enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Similar issues have been raised by the increasing use of information technology and the internet within the music industry, to market and distribute music. Patents protect the right to make, use, sell, or import a product (Kroninger, 2016, n.p.); however, information technology has also made it more and more difficult to prevent the illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted music by means such as the private transfer of digital files and the public sharing of digital recordings by means of sites such as YouTube. It seems likely that these difficulties will result in changes to the fundamental structure of the music industry, as business needs to adapt and evolve more rapidly than laws can address. It may be that the music industry turns to more technologically-suitable means of profiting from music, and that the nature of music itself becomes less about individual creativity.