Intellectual Property Rights

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).