Intellectual Property

What is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property is any original, business-related or inventive or any exclusive name, sign, logo or design used for commercial purposes. The intellectual property is protected by Patents on inventions, trademarks on branding device, copyrights on music or videos and trade secrets for methods that have economic value and is used commercially. This is especially useful to protect originality of ideas so that they are not misused and abused.

Types of intellectual property

There re four important classifications of intellectual property. They are:

• Patent. Patent is a grant issued by the federal government providing the inventor a right to prohibit others from making, using, leasing, selling, or misusing a creation. The patent is limited to the people who are prohibited alone and not the inventor himself who has the right to sell, lease or make use of his inventions. The person who violates the patent rights is known as infringement and the person can have legal action taken against him.

• Trademark. A non-functional word, logo, symbol or design or one or more of these that helps in identifying with a product or service is protected by the federal government by Trademark. There can be a legal action taken against any one who violates the Trademarks.

• Copyright. Copyright helps in protecting the originality of authorship, or creation of any kind of talent or expression. Copyrights can be set on unpublished or publish content, be it written, dramatic, musical, pictures, poetry, paintings, any form of arts or anything that can be copied, from being copied. The creator of ideas has protection against the concept alone, but not the idea. The authors would still have the restricted authority to the material that has been copyrighted.

• Trade Secret. Trade secret protects just that, the trade secrets of anything that has been manufactured with the help of technical and other sources. It can be a formula, a process of manufacturing a specific item, methods of business, or anything that can be of help to people who are competitors. Trade secrets would cover a larger scope of information, so make sure that you have trade secrets set for any information that might prove useful to your competitors.

Intellectual property allows people to protect the originality of their creations and has been found very useful in trying to limit the misuse and abuse of such creations. It provides limitations on people based on the type of right a particular invention has been granted, and violators are known to be prosecuted for misuse of valuable information.