Finding More About Intellectual Property

A product or property of an intellect that holds some commercial value and includes copyrighted property like the work of an artists or a property such as patents, business methods, industrial processes, etc., is known as Intellectual Property.

Intellectual Property is actually the creation of the mind in some form of an artistic work, names, images, designs, and symbols, with some commercial significance.

The concept to intellectual property is related to the concept of physical property. As a person has some protective rights over physical properties, similarly he can also have some protective rights over his intellect property.

There are two sub-categories of Intellectual Properties, namely, the Industrial and the Copyright Property.

The Industrial intellectual property refers to trademarks, inventions, geographic indication of the sources, and industrial designs. While the Copyright intellectual property refers to artistic work like plays, poems, films, photographs, paintings, and much more.

Let us understand these two types of intellectual properties in detail.

Understanding Industrial Intellectual Property: The Industrial intellectual property takes many forms. The property includes patents to protect industrial designs and inventions that create appearance of industrial products.

Patents of Inventions: Laws defining the protection of inventions possess a different meaning. For example, to discover a thing that already exists, like invention of an unknown planet is not regarded as an invention according to the law. But, the invention of an altogether new substance is regarded as an invention.

All inventions are not patentable. There are certain conditions which an invention should meet to be patentable. The invention should have some practical applicability; it must show some new characteristics, some inventive steps, and some more conditions.

Understanding Copyright Intellectual Property: As mentioned above, Copyright Property refers to some artistic work like music, paintings, photographs, etc. Author's right is the meaning of copyright in European languages, other than English. Copyright is an act made only by the author, or an act made at the artist's approval. This means the author has some legal rights over his creation, which only he can exercise.

Thus, Industrial intellectual property and Copyrighted intellectual property differ from each other. Inventions in non-legal terms are defined as new solutions to technical problems. These new solutions are actually ideas protected under patent laws. According to these protection laws, no one can use these inventions without the authorization of the inventor.

Unlike protection law for inventions or Intellectual property, the Copyright law protects the form of the expression of ideas, and not the ideas in actual.

Thus, we have seen what intellectual property is, and how intellectual property is classified into Industrial and Copyrighted properties.