What is Intellectual Property

What is Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property or IP is a legal concept that includes trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other related rights. The holder of intellectual property has exclusive rights to their creative work, commercial symbol, or invention. Some governments recognized forms of intellectual property for a few centuries and other governments have recognized intellectual property only recently.

Some parts of intellectual property include trademarks, copyrights, and patents. Trademarks are a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade of goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from other similar goods. Trademark rights can be used to prevent others from using the same or similar words, names, symbols, or devices. Copyrights are a word, phrase, symbol, or logo used to identify a product and the source of the product or the manufacturer or merchant. Patents is a legal grant issued by the government permitting an inventor to exclude others from using, making, or selling a claimed invention. Patents run 20 years from the filing date.

Other intellectual property topics include trade secret misappropriations, patenting computer software, patent law, copyright law, and copyright fair use laws. A trade secret is known as any information relating to business, finances, science, technology, engineering, or economy that can be stored electronically, graphically, photographically or in writing. Trade secrets in general entail information that is not widely known and can present an advantage of some sort to the owner or the general public. Some possible trade secrets include patterns, programs, codes, devices, procedures, compilations, prototypes, methods, and techniques. Copyright laws grant protection to the original works of authorship. Trade secret laws protect important information that is not commonly known to the public.