Intellectual and tangible property protection in pharmaceutical companies

Pharmaceutical Property

Intellectual and Tangible Property Rights and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Current Rends and General management

Protecting Tangible Property Rights

Protecting its tangible property is one of the most essential property management tasks of any pharmaceutical company; it is through the company's physical assets that capital can be raised to further research and development, expand operations, and continue producing both intellectual and tangible property in the form of drug formulas and the actual manufacture of medicines (Ghauri & Rao 2008). It has been suggested that removing the costly research and development phases of drug production from a dependency on tangible property through increased governmental and academic funding would benefit the pharmaceutical industry by limiting the likelihood of infringement upon tangible property rights (Ghauri & Rao 2008). This would also lead to problems deriving the same profits from exclusive patents on tangible and intellectual property, however.

The tangible assets of a pharmaceutical company are not limited to the products it manufactures, but also include the facilities of the company and all of its equipment. In this industry, tangible property such as specialized equipment can be stolen as intellectual property -- knowledge of how the equipment is designed -- and thus in order to protect all of the company's tangible property, managers must limit the areas of knowledge different employees have regarding the manufacturing processes of various drugs. The protection of tangible property in the pharmaceutical industry, therefore, must necessarily include measures that protect against the infringement of intellectual property rights as well (Long 2000).

Protecting Other Firms

Refraining from infringing on another company's tangible and intellectual property rights might be seem to be a simple task, but it does require that certain actions are taken by pharmaceutical company managers. First and foremost, knowledge of the property right laws in effect must be obtained and thoroughly understood in order to refrain from infringing upon them. With this knowledge in place, managers can ensure that any similarities that develop between their own products and/or processes will not be legally infringing upon another company's rights. In order for this to be fully effective, however, companies must ironically have some knowledge of current patents and property rights obtained by other companies in the industry, especially those developing similar products.

This is the reason, of course, that certain patent information is made publicly available, and managers must take careful consideration of these records when guiding their companies through development processes of their own, as even accidental infringement is infringement. The careful attention of the manager to industry and company-specific developments will also ensure that any attempts at infringement by research and production leaders and/or staff can be detected early and quickly dealt with, rather than becoming an unexpected embarrassment for the company after a great deal of capital has been spent on development.