I was interested today to note this article in The Guardian, Seeing double: what China's copycat culture means for architecture. There are photos of remarkable unauthorised copies in China of famous monuments abroad, the copyright or reputations in which are associated with famous names in architecture such as Zaha Hadid and Le Corbusier.

The Guardian's theme is that copies are made of famous non-Chinese buildings and monuments, both old and new.

The one experience I've had with architecture, copyright and China runs opposite to The Guardian story.

A close friend is a distinguished architect. One of his greatest jobs was an inspired yacht club design and associated apartment development some years ago in Australia. Within a year of being finished, via an online search it caught the eye of people in south China who sought to establish a similar coastal facility.

When used on its own, do not expect business law to get you to a sensible or good result. It can happen but it is not a given.

When only purely legal thinking is in operation often business law is a road to nonsense, failure or suboptimal results.

Human resources managers can do many practical things to protect an organisation's intellectual property. However few do.

One reason is that HR professionals and boards know too little about what IP is and how to benefit from it.

This practical article lists tasks that will increase the value of the HR function within an organisation. They'll also minimise legal costs from disputes or litigation and increase the value of the organisation's IP.

Implement those tasks and you'll be using law and lawyers for fire prevention. (It usually costs much more if you only use lawyers for putting out legal fires.) You'll also make important links in your organisation between intellectual property and the people who create it for the organisation.

Apple Inc. is becoming the registered proprietor and licensor back to The Beatles of the Granny Smith record company logo, so far for sure in Canada.

This trade mark licence ends a trail of three decades of litigation cases over money between Apple, Inc and The Beatles. Lightbulb overviewed that story in 2011.

Mashable reports that "In March 2011, to ensure ownership of the logo, Apple filed for the Apple Corps logo trademark in Europe under 14 International Classifications covering, among other matters, computer hardware, online social networking services, mobile phones, musical instruments, games, clothing/headgear and advertising."

Trade mark registration can be expensive. I have 30 years of evidence in my legal career showing that picking legally weak trade marks is the biggest cause of wasted costs.

Bad brands - in legal terms - waste money on registration and in brand protection with letters of demand.

Here's 17 articles with plenty of tips from our firm on how to select legally strong marks.

A recent Mark Cuban blog post on the cost of tertiary education and the level of student debt in the United States has relevance which extends beyond his country and topic. It grapples with major issues about the future of tertiary education. It's a huge topic. This is just a Lightbulb note for reference.

Cuban's title is overblown: "The Coming Meltdown in College Education & Why The Economy Won't Get Better Any Time Soon". Cuban is often a scrappy writer. This does not get in the way of the fact that he is easy to read, explores new ideas, and debates opinions, often in opposition to popular views.

On student debt the alarming debt figures he quotes speak for themselves. He states that the "37 million holders of student loans have more debt than the 175 million or so credit card owners" in the United States. He says this is more than the debt on cars in the United States.

People create intellectual property. This requires the loyalty of employees and independent contractors and loyalty in return from the organisations that engage them.

Loyalty can be eroded by mismanagement. It is also being eroded it seems by wider changes. This includes the way people today find jobs, change jobs, and work. From CEO down, employees are shifting jobs at a faster rate than ever.

Digital content developers appreciate that today differences betweens screens affect user experience with content.

User experience differs in numerous ways for content between tablets, smartphones, ereaders, laptops and desktops.

Content jumps off the screen when it suits the target format or device. Today content follows format, a reversal of the 20th century design principle that form follows content.

What triggered Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, to put all his eggs in 1994 into his online business and its commercialisation?

Was it love of books? Was it confidence in his programming capability, which first developed in high school? Being a graduate of Princeton where he designed a computer system to calculate DNA sequences? Securing angel investors? Or was it securing venture capital from a blue chip Silicon Valley firm?

It was all of that. And none of that.

Richard L. Brandt, author of One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com, assures us page after page that the trigger was Bezos noted in 1994 the exponential growth in the numbers of users of the internet.

My approach to law draws a great deal of inspiration from thinking by economists. What works in economics thinking for countries often also does for start-up, established or institutional business. The latest inspiration for this is The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World. This 2011 book is by Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize recipient in Economic Science in 2001.

After serving as a dean at Stanford and Harvard, for the World Bank Commission on Growth and Development, from 2006 to 2010 Spence reluctantly took on the mission to research what made growth tick for developing countries.

What Spence's field research uncovered is to my mind as applicable for business growth as it is for growth by developing countries.