The Protection Of Business Models By Intellectual Property

Nowadays, with the development of economic and society, the competition among different enterprises is no longer limited to competitions between products and services, because competitions between business models play an increasingly and extremely important role on the competition among enterprises. A successful business model, not only can enable enterprises to gain a huge competitive advantage, but also improve the efficiency of economic and our society. However, if a successful business model is frequently imitated without the permission of the creator owning to the lack the protection by law, creators will lose passion for creating more new useful business model, which will result that there will be no innovations to be created in the business field. In the age when our country’s economy is going to transform from labor-intensive and resource-intensive economy to the knowledge-based economy, intellectual property protection has become a priority of national development strategies. In this context, protecting business model by intellectual property law and fair competition law will become an important part of our intellectual property strategy.The first part of this paper describes the reasons why the author chose this topic. The second part of the paper describes what is business model, characteristics and values of business model and the relationship between business model and business methods. The third part will discuss why we need to protect business model by law with theories as followings: the labor theory of property rights, incentive theory and the theory of the economics of law. In the fourth part, the author will discuss how to protect business models by trade secrets law and patent law from suffering from the imitation without permission of the creator and how to ensure that business model can run without being disturbed by others by fair competition law. The fifth part will describe what efforts China and foreign counties have made to protect business model by law, and then will discuss what we can learn from the practice mentioned above. The sixth part will provide some suggestions for how to protect business model from being imitated by others by trade secrets law and patent law, and form being disturbed by others by fair competition law.