Intellectual property rights play a vital role in creating jobs, stimulating economic growth and solving problems that impact communities across the world. These include lifesaving drugs and agricultural technologies that improve food production and reduce environmental impacts.
성범죄전문변호사By exchanging limited exclusive rights in inventions, artistic works and designs, society and creators mutually benefit. This mutuality is the driving force behind IP laws and policies.
What is IP?
Intellectual property (IP) is the product of a person’s mind — inventions, literary and artistic works, designs and symbols. It can also include confidential business information such as formulas and recipes or the distinctive look of products.
It is protected by law in the United States through trademarks, patents and copyrights. The laws are intended to encourage and reward innovation and creativity by giving owners exclusive rights to their creations for a limited time. It is important for businesses to understand these rights and the penalties that can result from their unauthorized use.
These protections are important to all kinds of businesses, including technology companies, which depend on IP rights to support the development and advancement of their products. Consumers also rely on intellectual property rights to ensure that they are receiving safe and authentic products.
There are four main areas of intellectual property: copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets. While these categories are similar in some ways, they each have their own unique features. For example, copyright protects the work of creators such as authors, musicians and designers – and gives them the right to reproduce their works and to benefit from their sale. Patents, on the other hand, give inventors the right to prevent others from making, using, offering for sale or selling their inventions.
Copyright
Copyright protects the author’s exclusive right to make copies of their creative work for a limited period. This work can be anything that is fixed in a tangible medium of expression, including writing (fiction and nonfiction), poetry, musical compositions (words and music alike), dramatic works, paintings, drawings, photographs, architectural works, computer programs and films. Copyright protection only exists in the United States when the creator of a creative work first registers it with the U.S. Copyright Office, which provides valuable information to the licensing marketplace and a public record of this nation’s creativity.
Although intellectual property rights are similar in that they all protect products of the mind, they differ in many ways. Patents, for example, grant inventors the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale or importing a specific invention. This type of intellectual property protection has been used to protect famous inventions such as the light bulb, the internal combustible engine and Barbie. In contrast, copyright gives the owner of a creative work the right to prevent others from using their creations without permission, even for educational purposes. This system of legal protection is designed to optimize social utility by providing innovators with a financial incentive to produce new ideas. In exchange for limited exclusive rights, society gains a broader range of innovative goods and services.
Trademarks
The trademark law protects the public from confusion among consumers and grants a limited statutory monopoly to those who register their marks. A trademark is a word, symbol, image, or combination of these elements that identify and distinguish a business’ goods or services from those of its competitors. Think of the distinct orange color associated with Reese’s peanut butter cups and the bite-marked apple logo associated with Apple computers — both of which are registered trademarks.
Trademarks apply to a specific class of products (goods or services) and thus prevent others from using similar symbols or names in the same classes (e.g., the Coca-Cola bottle and the Delta Airlines jet). This is important to businesses because it prevents other companies from piggybacking off of their investments in branding and brand recognition.
The law of intellectual property is generally based on the exchange of limited exclusive rights in return for disclosure of inventions and creative works to society. This is viewed as providing an incentive for inventors and authors to create and disclose their work, allowing them to capture “the full social value of their creations.”
Patents and copyrights are protected under federal legislation and have constitutional bases in the U.S. Constitution, the “intellectual property” clause and the Commerce Clause. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) regulates the registration of trademarks, but the process is lengthy and time-consuming.
Patents
Patents are a form of protection granted to inventors that allow them to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale or selling their invention. This gives the inventor a limited time monopoly that allows them to recoup the costs associated with their investment in creating their new technology.
Patent laws are designed to stimulate innovation and the development of new technology by providing a legal incentive and means for financing research and the high initial cost involved in developing a product or service based on a newly developed technology. In the United States, the Patent and Trademark Office grants patents for inventions that meet certain criteria including novelty, non-obviousness, and industrial application.
There are several types of patents available including design patents, plant patents and utility patents. The name “patent” is derived from the Latin term “patere,” which refers to open document, and is a shortened version of the earlier term letters patent, which were grants of exclusive rights by monarchs and governments predating modern patent systems.
Patents are generally owned by the inventor or their successors, but in practice the ownership may be transferred to third parties. Often when an inventor works for an employer they are asked to sign a contract that assigns ownership of intellectual property (including patents) to the employer. This usually includes a prohibition on the inventor practicing their invention outside of the scope of the employment agreement.