What Is Intellectual Property Rights And Everything You Should Know About It

Intellectual property is the creation of the mind that includes inventions, literary and artistic work, design, symbol, and names, etc. Meanwhile, IP is protected by law such as patents, copyrights, trademarks which ensure that people could earn or get benefit from their inventions or creations. Simultaneously, these contribute to national and state economies and make it better and better.   In today’s scenario, most of us don’t know about intellectual property rights and their impacts. Generally, the IP system helps to promote an environment where creativity and innovation could develop without any hurdle or restrictions. However, in a technological era, Intellectual property protection and its enforcement are one the biggest challenge to deal. And these IP rights are worth protecting in-country or abroad.  Let’s go in detail.

What are intellectual property rights?

In general, Intellectual property rights refer to the rights or authority given to the creator or inventor for his creativity or inventions. These rights allow holders to use of his/her creation for a specific period of time. IP rights include trade secrets, patents, copyrights, and trademarks.

Trade Secrets

Whenever an inventor starts to invent something, it’s required to keep it secret. In such a situation trade secrets help to inventors and provide immunity to their inventions. Actually trade secret is confidential business information in the form of formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, which provides a competitive edge or economic advantage over competitors. It helps to keep business information secret. Trade secrets are not registered with any governmental body, the law but specifically protects the misappropriation of information. Whenever someone misappropriated the trade secret, then you would have to prove in a court of law that the information is your trade secret.

Now the other three property rights are also very helpful to protect intellectual property. Depending upon utilization or type of creativity you want to protect, you can opt for any one of these.

Patents–

A patent is one of the intellectual property that provides legal immunity to the owner and preventing others from making, using, selling, and importing an invention for a specific period of years. Basically, patent is a right for an invention where an inventor can find himself secure to do more innovative in the absence of fear of stealing his idea.  Patents play an important role in the day to day life, where it promotes the development of new technologies.

If we go more in detail, there are two kinds of patents one for utility (function) and other for design. While discussing different sorts of IP rights, patents can give you more security for your product or invention. A person can file a utility patent application or design patent application as describe the invention in terms of its function or design. Patent ( Intellectual Property ) valid for 20 years.

Copyrights

Copyright is a form of intellectual property protection given to the creator of work includes literary, dramatic, musical, painting, artistic, and certain other creative works. And it’s one of the best laws that save authors, artists, or creators’ hard work to get misuse. As per definition copyright as “a person’s exclusive right to reproduce, publish, or sell his or her original work of authorship (as a literary, musical, dramatic, artistic, or architectural work).”

If someone does copyright infringement, then the owner can take legal action against the person who infringes. Copyright law helps to secure the time, effort, and creativity of the creators. The copyright act offers exclusive rights to the owner, which includes perform and display work in public, allows to distribute copies for sale, lease and transfer of ownership, reproduce of work, etc. Copyright protection lasts till the life of the author or creator plus an additional 70 years.

Trademarks

Trademark generally refers to intellectual property consisting of a recognizable insignia, design, word, symbol or phrase that identify and legally differentiate products and services from others. A trademark specifically identifies a product belonging to a particular company and ensure the ownership of that company and its goods or services. This can also be used for other types of licensing agreements, and in case of infringement, trademark law protects the owner and allows him to take legal action against the person who infringes. The most frequent trademarks are wordmarks, logos, and slogans.

Here it’s worth noted that if you want to protect your trademark, then you should do a comprehensive search and find out that others are not using the same. If you satisfy that no one is using, then file a trademark application for registering a trademark.

Hopefully, this article would help you to get general information about Intellectual property protection and rights.