Intellectual Property Right
Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations
of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols,
names, images, and designs. An intellectual
property right or law gives one exclusive rights over his/her creation. Since
it’s an intellectual property, it can be sold, traded and dealt with like any
other property.
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 intellectual property for two main reasons. First is to
give statutory expression to the moral and economic rights of creators in their
creations and the 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 and to encourage fair-trading,
which would contribute to economic and social development.
Intellectual
property law aims at safeguarding creators and other producers of intellectual
goods and services by granting them certain time-limited rights to control the
use made of those productions. Those
rights do not apply to the physical object in which the creation may be
embodied but instead to the intellectual creation as such.
IP
is categorized as Industrial
Property (functional commercial innovations), and Artistic and Literary Property (cultural
creations).
