KNOWLEDGE BEYOND BORDERS
Authors: Zenker Ilona 
Published: September 2021

―Common knowledge‖ refers to information that the average, educated citizen would accept as reliable without checking it up. The ―personal knowledge‖ possessed by any individual, usually accumulated through observation, research or personal experiences. ―Intellectual knowledge‖ is any product of the human intellect that the law protects from unauthorized use by others. Intellectual property is legally protected as patent, copyright or trademark. Knowledge can only skip borders in case of a proper knowledge transfer (KT). KT can be difficult because of different views on explicitness of knowledge, language, geography, generational differences, religions aspects, political influence, competition, economical issues, national and international conflicts, migration, misconceptions, mutual trust, rewards, timeframe, IT capacities, faulty information, motivation issues or communication. Communication can be a boundary. Effective knowledge transfer requires an effective understanding between sender and receiver. Every field of knowledge has its own jargon and special technical terms. To solve ―syntactic boundaries‖, a common lexicon for terms must be developed. Now sender and receiver have to find a common understanding to avoid misinterpretation. Semantic boundaries‖ focus on translating knowledge and to develop common interpretations. ―Pragmatic boundary‖ is the conflict of the different interest for the parties to use knowledge. Knowledge beyond borders has to deal with legal borders, which are national and international regulation and laws. Transferring knowledge without legal protection would lead to unauthorized access or even illegal alteration of knowledge. If a source of knowledge must be afraid to lose control over his intellectual property it could cause a total stop of exchanging of knowledge, especially beyond borders. Therefore protection of intellectual property is the bridge to overcome such borders. Under German law intellectual knowledge is protected by: German Patent Act: A patent is an official right to be the only person or company allowed to make or to sell a new product or a new idea for a certain period of time. A German patent can be obtained through the direct filing of a national patent application with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, through the filing of a European patent application or through the filing of an international application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. The German patent has a term of 20 years. German Trademark Act: A trademark is a recognizable sign or design, capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one enterprise from those of other enterprises. A trademark may be established through actual use in the marketplace, or through registration of the mark with the trademarks office. German Copyright Act: Another type of intellectual property is creative works such as paintings, writing, architecture, software, photos, dance and music are protected by the German Copyright Act (Urheberrechtsgesetz). The copyright law protects an author regarding their intellectual and personal relationship to the work and the types of its utilization. A work and the knowledge behind must meet certain minimum criterions to qualify for copyright protection. There a different kinds of copy rights, which are exclusive licences, exploitations rights, non-exclusive and exclusive rights of use. The length of protection also varies depending on when the work was created or first published. The true source of improving human welfare is knowledge without borders. Therefore it is more important than ever to protect the intellectual knowledge to distribute knowledge over national and international borders without harming the source of knowledge, which is at the end the mind of an individual person. As a consequence borders will become bridges.