Intellectual property law grants property rights to abstract ideas and works, encouraging innovation. The four main branches are copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret. Copyright protects original works, trademark protects symbols or phrases, patent grants ownership of inventions, and trade secret protects confidential business information.
Intellectual property law is a branch of property law that gives a property right to abstract ideas and works resulting from the creator’s thinking. The purpose of intellectual property law depends on the industry, but in general it is to encourage the continued advancement of ideas. There are four main branches of intellectual property law, each with its own particularities: copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret.
Copyright is the protection for authors of any original author’s work embodied in any tangible form, such as a writing or recording. Copyright is the branch of intellectual property that grants ownership of literary works, films, music and works of art and gives the author the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the work. In addition, copyright grants the owner the exclusive right to develop new works of authorship based on the original.
The trademark is a branch of intellectual property law which gives its owner the exclusive right to use a symbol or a phrase connected with the sale of goods. The purpose of trademarking is slightly different than other branches of intellectual property in that it is not only to benefit the trademark right holder but also to protect consumers. The idea is that the mark identifies the source of the product that bears the mark and if another source is using the mark fraudulently then it can mislead the buyer who may believe that a different company made the product than what actually did.
Patent is the branch of intellectual property law that grants an ownership right in a process or invention to its creator. The requirements for a product or process to be patentable are typically that it must be of practical use and contain a novel feature not currently known to those skilled in the art relating to the product or process. By granting inventors exclusive rights to a product or process, patent law encourages innovation and technological development.
Trade secrets are perhaps the least discussed and most abstract branch of intellectual property law. They are generally defined as confidential business information that gives the trade secret holder a competitive advantage in their industry. Trade secrets can encompass everything from sales methods to manufacturing processes. In general, the distinguishing feature of a trade secret is that it is information or a process that the company holding the secret takes steps to ensure is not made public.
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