FORMS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

FORMS OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

1. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are rights governed by statute that provide individuals with a right to prevent others from exploiting or abusing their intellectual creations.

   • The more common forms of IPR are
     • PATENTS
       • A patent is a legal title granted to an applicant for protection of an invention. It is a registerable form of IP. It must be applied for at a patent office by submission of a ‘patent specification’ disclosing how the invention works. The patent is granted for a limited period by the patent office, acting as an instrument of the government in the country in which the patent is applied for.Requirements for a Patent Patent law requires that certain conditions are met in order for an invention to be patentable. Specifically, the following criteria must be fulfilled: The invention must be novel (new); It must involve an inventive step (not obvious); It must be capable of industrial application; and It must not fall into the ‘excluded’ category for non-patentable matter. Additionally, the applicant is required to disclose sufficient information in the patent application to show how the invention works.
     • COPYRIGHT
       • Copyright is a form of IP designed to protect the rights of a creator of literary and artistic works, computer programs and databases. It does not provide protection for the ideas, concepts or inventions in these works . Rather, it protects the author’s or creator’s ‘expression’ per se of the ideas and concepts and determines the rights of ownership and use of works falling within the copyright. Copyright allows the creators to control the use and exploitation of their works, and derivative works thereof, and covers the copying, adapting, publishing, performing and broadcasting of such works. Unlike patent protection, where a patent provides the owner with a monopoly on the invention, copyright does not provide the creator with a monopoly on his work. Copyright typically is enforced to prevent copying, plagiarism, and misuse of a work, but it does not prevent a third party from independent development of the idea or a similar work.
     • TRADE MARKS
       • A trade mark is the symbol by which the goods of a particular manufacturer or trader can be identified and distinguished from the goods of others. Trade marks and service marks provide protection for the goodwill and reputation of a company in its products and services, as opposed to protection of the products . So for instance, while the formulation per se and appearance of a company’s hand-cream products sold under a particular trade mark may be re-developed and constantly improved over time, its trade mark ensures that only the company, or its licensees, may sell the newly-developed hand-cream products under that name.
     • DESIGN RIGHTS
       • Traditionally, most EU Member States operated a system for protection of industrial designs associated with the ‘artistic’ or ‘aesthetic’ features of a design. However, this is no longer the important determining feature, as design rights are now directed towards the ‘individual character’ of a design. While each country has its own IP laws that include protection for designs, there are two important international systems in operation for the protection of industrial designs: the Community Design system and the Hague Agreement. Requirements of a Design For a design to be recognised as qualifying for protection under the Community Design Regulation, it must comply with the following three requirements: It must fall within the definition of a ‘design’; It must be novel (absolute worldwide novelty, similar to patent law); and It must have ‘individual character’.
     • KNOW-HOW
       • For some companies, ‘know-how’ and ‘trade secrets’ can be just as valuable a piece of IP as a patented technology. This form of IP usually relates to a technology process or manufacturing method, which is not patented either because it does not satisfy the criteria for patentability, or because a decision is made not to patent it, since in order to apply for a patent, full details of the process must be disclosed. Therefore, in some cases, to avoid having a valuable industrial process being published in the patent specification for all to see, a strategic business decision may be made to maintain it as confidential industrial know-how or as a trade secret

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