PROFESSOR DAMODARAN: Hello, everyone.
I am Professor Damodaran from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
I am here to give a snapshot of my MOOC [INAUDIBLE]
on intellectual property rights.
For about a decade, I have been teaching intellectual property rights
in classrooms.
But it was not until very recently, maybe a year ago,
that I realized that intellectual property rights are about your life.
All of us are fond of surfing the internet.
Many of us are particularly fond of YouTube clips.
So I have this habit of browsing or going through the YouTube
to find out pieces of music.
So there was this day when I chanced upon a great live performance of Sir
Paul McCartney in Tokyo.
It was an electrifying performance because of the audience
that Sir McCartney had to face.
The audience was like a sea of red luminescent batons
which were being waved like the wipers of a car.
It was an electrifying effect.
And when I was going through it, one image struck me--
Sir McCartney playing piano of Yamaha.
And the words Yamaha and the logo of Yamaha,
which is basically three fountain pens-- two crossed and one vertically faced--
left a great mark in my mind.
So at the end of the show--
it was right about five minutes--
I could see three things said Paul McCartney playing the piano and singing
and, of course, Yamaha with its logo.
And come to think of it, what is this Yamaha's logo?
Yamaha's logo is nothing but a trademark.
It was then that it occurred to me that what I was teaching in classrooms
was about intellectual property rights as a legal system,
as an economic system, or as a business proposition.
It never struck me that it is very close to my life.
A few days later, I wake up on a Sunday morning to an unusual idea--
let me count the number of products that I use.
So I started off at 5:30.
I started looking at every product that I
used, looked at the brands that underlaid these products,
and also examined these products for perhaps the technological
that it gives.
For instance, my android phone--
a brilliant trademark is there, a brand is there.
There's a casing, and the casing has a design.
There is a patent, not one, many patents embedded in the system.
And at the end of it, what did I find?
I would be using brands which have a plethora of intellectual property
rights built around it.
I counted 33 brands that day, and I never fancied myself
as a brand conscious person.
It was then that I realized that IPRs are something that we live on,
something which surrounds us, something that's just internal to us,
which is external to us.
And we live and breathe it, and we experience it.
I felt that I needed to do a MOOC course, a MOOC
course on intellectual property rights, which says, in essence, that it relates
to your life.
Whether you like it or not, it is with us.
Whether you're conscious or not, it is with us.
Sample my MOOC on IPS.
I'm sure it will have something different to tell you.
Thank you.
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