What is Intellectual Property?

What is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property rights refers to the general term for the assignment of property rights through patents, copyrights and trademarks. These property rights allow the holder to exercise a monopoly on the use of the item for a specified period.  

In Simple words:

Property is anything you own. You have the rights over your property. It is protected by law. Even your ideas and thinking produced by your mind are also protected by law. 

Answer this:

Lets say, you are in your school or office or somewhere. You don't have a pen with you. You see someone else having a pen. What would you do?

(a) You take the pen without their permission.

(b) You ask the owner of the pen if you can use it.

Here, (a) is stealing. (b) you have the permission of the owner to use the pen. 

This is similar to any property you use. It's illegal to use the product without the permission of the owner or producer. The rights related to literary or artistic work, inventions, discoveries, etc., are called intellectual property rights.

In Detail:

Intellectual property (or "IP") is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect, and primarily encompasses copyrights,patents, and trademarks. It also includes other types of rights, such as trade secrets, publicity rights,moral rights, and rights against unfair competition.  

The main purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to the information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. Because they can earn profit from them, this gives economic incentive for their creation.

The intangible nature of intellectual property presents difficulties when compared with traditional property like land or goods. Unlike traditional property, intellectual property is indivisible – an unlimited number of people can "consume" an intellectual good without it being depleted. Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from problems of appropriation – a landowner can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, but a producer of information or an intellectual good can usually do very little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price. Balancing rights so that they are strong enough to encourage the creation of intellectual goods but not so strong that they prevent their wide use is the primary focus of modern intellectual property law

Okay, this is enough for now. We'll see other related terms in the next post. Do let me know what you think.