The law grants property holders specific rights to what they own. Property owners have the right to improve, to use, and to enjoy their property, but the most important is the right to exclude. If a thing is yours and someone takes, occupies or otherwise deprives you of it, then you have a remedy. The police, the courts or the government will compel the taker to give it back or give it up. Property law is not limited to places or things, but also includes ideas (in tangible form, that is). So, what is intellectual property? The most fundamental form of intellectual property is a secret. No one can take a perfectly kept secret. Where intellectual property is poorly protected, secrets are the intellectual property protection of last resort. Secrets, however, have real limitations. The more you share your secret, the harder it becomes to protect. When you do share it, it is nearly impossible to protect yourself should the secret get out. In addition to being difficult to keep leaking secrets, it is very hard to punish the leakers. What if someone comes up with the idea that you are keeping secret on their own? Good intellectual property protection protects your idea no matter how else someone comes up with it. Intellectual property laws allow inventors, authors or anyone to own the tangible form of an idea without having to keep it secret. The U.S. Constitution Grants Congress the Power to Pass Intellectual Property Laws The Constitution empowers Congress to pass intellectual property laws among other fundamental powers of government: establishing courts, declaring war and raising taxes. The power to pass intellectual property laws recognized intellectual property’s importance. The Constitution grants Congress the power to pass intellectual property laws in order to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” We, as a country, give exclusive rights to intellectual property so that inventors and authors are willing to disclose their inventions. A good intellectual property definition starts with the most recognizable forms of intellectual property: copyright, trademark and patent. Each provides different kinds of exclusive rights: Patent: the right to make, use, sell, have made or import an invention (e.g. a new kind of solar panel) Copyright: the right to copy, make derivatives of, distribute, perform or display a work (e.g. the screenplay for a movie) Trademark: the right to use a mark for a particular purpose (e.g. the name “laundrymatic” for an app-based washing machine sharing service) Other Intellectual Property Rights: Trade Secrets, Expert Knowledge and More There is more to intellectual property rights than the 3 well-known categories recognized by federal intellectual property law. For example, trade secret laws help trade secret owners keep their secrets. A trade secret must be commercially valuable and the owner must rigorously protect the secret. The government will then help the owner protect the trade secret through criminal laws. Similarly, expert knowledge can be intellectual property. For example, a world expert on statistics can consult for a financial company to improve their risk analysis software. The financial company may ask the expert for exclusive rights to her statistical knowledge for all financial applications. Through the contracts they sign, the financial company and the statistician have defined exclusive rights around her expert knowledge of statistics. Some things that you may not know are considered intellectual property: The order of songs in a compilation album. The arrangement of other works in a compilation is protectable as a separate copyrightable work. Customer lists. Companies routinely claim that their commercially valuable data is a trade secret. Celebrity image. The right of publicity is a legally recognized form of intellectual property allowing anyone who builds their public image to exclude others from it. User interface. The way that a computer displays information can be protected under patent law. More and more, intellectual property is the most valuable part of the world’s most valuable companies. Recognizing all the ways to protect intellectual property is the first step towards protecting and realizing its value.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 00:32:40 +0000
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