Saturday, 19 December 2009

Types Of Intellectual Property

By Salvador Diaz

When we use the term property, it is not only the tangible things such as homes, structures, vehicles, money etc that are protected by law. There are several other forms of intangible property known as intellectual property that have been recognized under the law and granted protection against misuse. There are three primary kinds of property which come under this classification: copyrights, trademarks and patents.

Copyright is an intellectual property right that is granted by law to an author or any other type of creator for an original composition or creation. This right may be awarded for music, films, videos and other types of artistic expressions and not just the literary or published material. The copyright bestows the sole right of ownership over the piece in question besides rights to get monetary benefits arising from the work.

Trademarks afford intellectual property privileges which aim at pre-empting duplication and violation of graphical representations registered by someone for his own products, and they help a customer easily tell the source of a product. Trademark protection gives the holder complete protection from unscrupulous use of his own mark by others to mislead consumers.

The third kind of intellectual property right, known as patent, safeguards the rights of inventors in their innovative and beneficial invention. It gives them sole right of usage and sale of their work for a specific span.

There are some more intellectual property rights too which are rarely registered and used. To cite some instances of these rare intellectual properties, they can be some special understanding carried forward by a particular family only; company secrets like recipes behind popular products; and location based symbols or marks to refer to a product arising from that place, like Champagne.

While all the three kinds of intellectual property mentioned above are distinct from each other there are also some similarities. All of these are safeguarded within the legal framework and the rightful owners can take legal action in a court of law and claim reparation in case of any violation.

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