IP Value 2009: Recent Developments In Intellectual Property

This article first appeared in "IP Value 2009 – An international guide for the boardroom", published by Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) magazine.

Nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshall believed that with advancements in technology, commodities alone would no longer be the primary factor in determining the real value of money: "But if inventions have increased man's power over nature very much, then the real value of money is better measured for some purposes in labour than in commodities." This was so because commodities would gradually begin to have an ever-increasing intrinsic labour value ascribed to them. Today, this intrinsic labour value exists in the form of knowledge.