Intellectual Property is one of those words that gets mentioned quite a lot in conjunction with copyrights, trademarks, and patents, but what exactly is it?

As can be figured from the name, Intellectual Property is property of the intellect, that is, something that someone has made that required them to use their mind to create. Examples of Intellectual Property include such things as inventions, books, music, and films.

Most people use their Intellectual Property for financial gain by selling the book, film, or whatever it is that contains a manifestation of their work.

In the U.S. and other companies, we file for copyrights, trademarks, and patents to protect important Intellectual Properties (I.P.) for a period of time and so that the original creators can use their own intellectual properties for financial gain.

Copyrights protect works such as books, films, and music. The terms of copyright have varied through the ages, but currently copyright on a work lasts for the life of the author, plus 70 years after their death. However, if the work was created as a work for hire for a corporation, then the term is 95 years or 120 years after it was first created, whichever comes first.

A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination of those four items that distinguishes the source of one set of goods from another. These are commonly used as logos on cans of soda, packages of lunch meat, DVDs of television shows, or just about anything else. Most items created and sold today have a logo that could be trademarked. Most slogans used by anything from fast food franchises to grocery stores to radio stations could possibly be trademarked. For example, the "swoosh" used by Nike to denote their shoes is a registered trademark, as is the distinctive lettering the Coca-Cola company uses on their products.

A patent is used for inventions. Patents grant the inventor the right to use and disseminate their invention for a limited amount of time, usually around 20 years. At the end of the 20 years, anyone is free to use that invention without licensing it from the inventor. Many people use these newly public domain patents to build upon the original invention. There are also a few other things eligible for patent protection, these are patents for genes and drugs.

There is a fourth protection that isn't talked about much. It is called the trade secret. Trade secrets are not registered with either of the above offices, as one part of something being classed as a trade secret is that the ingredients of that item are kept secret from the public. The most well-known (in that people know it is a trade secret, but not what it is) is the formula for Coca-Cola. There is no limited terms involved in trade secrets as there are with the other three, but once the secret is publicly known, it loses any kind of protection it may have had.

Many items could be protected by several, or even all, of these laws. An example might well be Windows, the operating system created by Microsoft. Portions of the Windows code are most likely protected by trade secret. Other portions are protected by copyright, as could any booklets that come with the software. Certain aspects of how the operating system handles accessing information on a computer might be protected with a patent. To top it all off, the Windows name is typically followed by the ® of a registered trademark.

As part of submitting software to the Copyright Office, the first 50 and the last 50 pages of source code must be submitted on paper. Trade secrets are prevalent in software, and as much software can be copyrighted, the trade secret portions are to be blacked out in the source code for the paper submittal.

© ResearchCopyright.com