Intellectual Property
With the rise of competition through the Internet and on the global market, understanding intellectual property (IP) is more critical than ever. Having a strong IP position helps ensure that other people pay you for your innovation like they would a toll on a road.
Very broadly, IP means the legal rights which results from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary, and artistic fields. IP is divided into two categories: Industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and Copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs.
Countries have laws to protect IP for two main reasons. One is to give statutory expression to the moral and economic rights of creators in their creations and such rights of the public in access to those creations. The second is to promote, as a deliberate act of Government policy, creativity, and the dissemination and application of its results to encourage fair trading which would contribute to economic and social development.
Fields of Intellectual Property Protection
- Patents
A patent is a document, issued, upon application, by a government office (or a regional office acting for several countries), which describes an invention and creates a legal situation in which the patented invention can normally only be exploited (manufactured, used, sold, imported) with the authorization of the owner of the patent.
- Copyright and Related Rights
Copyright law deals with particular forms of creativity, concerned primarily with mass communication. It is concerned also with virtually all forms and methods of public communication, not only printed publications but also such matters as sound and television broadcasting, films for public exhibition in cinemas, etc. and even computerized systems for the storage and retrieval of information.
Related rights means rights related to, or “neighboring on”, copyright. It is generally understood that there are three kinds of related rights: the rights of performing artists in their performances, the rights of producers of phonograms in their phonograms, and the rights of broadcasting organizations in their radio and television programs.
- Trademarks
A trademark is any sign that individualizes the goods of a given enterprise and distinguishes them from the goods of its competitors. In order to individualize a product for the consumer, the trademark must indicate its source. The function of indicating the source as described above presupposes that the trademark distinguishes the goods of a given enterprise from those of other enterprises; only if it allows the consumer to distinguish a product sold under it from the goods of other enterprises offered.
- Industrial Designs and Integrated Circuits
The legal protection of industrial designs thus serves the important function of protecting one of the distinctive elements by which manufacturers achieve market success. The subject matter of the legal protection of industrial designs is not articles or products, but rather the design which is applied to or embodied in such articles or products.
‘Integrated circuit’ means a product, in its final form or an intermediate form, in which the elements, at least one of which is an active element, and some or all of the inter-connections are integrally formed in and/or on a piece of material and which is intended to perform an electronic function,
- Geographical Indications
Geographical Indications protection means the right to prevent unauthorized persons from using geographical indications, either for products which do not originate from the geographical place indicated, or not complying with the prescribed quality standards. The second aspect related to the issue of protection is the question of protecting geographical indications against becoming generic expressions: in that case they have lost all their distinctiveness and, consequently, will lose their protection.
- Protection Against Unfair Competition
Number of countries both in regions of the developed and developing world, are adopting or have adopted market economy systems, which allow free competition between industrial and commercial enterprises within certain limits defined by law. Free competition between enterprises is considered the best means of satisfying supply and demand in the economy. However, where there is competition, acts of unfair competition are liable to occur.
Protection against unfair competition is based not on such grants of rights but on the consideration—either stated in legislative provisions or recognized as a general principle of law—that acts contrary to honest business practice are to be prohibited.