THE LEGAL PROTECTION OF IDEAS

Abstract

Ideas are purely abstract elements. They pre-exist to creations, are grounded on them, however no one in any field of creation does not have monopoly upon raw ideas. In order to prevent invoking some privative right upon them and, in order to make sure that they are remining no one’s and to all in the same time, in order to prevent blocking the creative and research activity by their possible closeness, they are expressly excluded from protection. Romania makes an exception from this rule because by a law whose object of regulation is constituted by good conduct in scientific research, „introducing within your work texts, expressions, ideas, demonstrations, data, hypotheses, theories, results or scientific methods extracted from written works (…) of other authors without mentioning such fact and without indicating the original sources” constitutes plagiarism. And if you retrieve from your own works any idea, theory, or method without indicating such fact, it is called self-plagiarism.

Keywords

• idea
• protectable intellectual creations
• unfair competition
• exclusion from the protection
• know-how