What is Intellectual Property? (also known as IP)
Wikipedia defines it as a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The most well-known types are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.
Intellectual property, or IP, is any unique creation of your own mind that the law protects from being stolen.The law protects you from having your ideas, or the creations that come from your ideas, from being stolen by other businesses.
The law offers three main types of protection for your intellectual property:
- Trademarks
- Copyrights
- Patents
The Law actually offers some level of intellectual property protection, but the most common way to protect yourself is by registering for intellectual property protection with the laws of you state. For example, in Nigeria,3 main laws governs the protection and administration of Intellectual Property include, the Copyright Act, the Patents and Designs Act, and the Trade Marks Act.
We would be talking about 3 categories of protection: trademarks, copyrights, and patents.
- TRADEMARK
A trademark is any word, name, symbol, or design, or any combination thereof, used in commerce to identify and distinguish the goods of one manufacturer or seller from those of another and to indicate the source of the goods.A trademark is something that usually protects the name or the logo of your business.
If your business is called ABC Corp., you could register a trademark so that nobody else can start a business called ABC Corp. in your specific line of work.
Trademarks can not only protect the name of your business, but also how your business name is written and visually represented. That could include a specific font, style, and colour; or the actual logo for your business.
- COPYRIGHTS
Another type of Intellectual Property is Copyright, which traditionally protects things like the written word. If you write a book, you have a copyright on that book.Copyright is the exclusive rights granted to the creator of an original work to reproduce, modify, to distribute, and perform his work.
Works eligible for Copyright protection includes; Literary works, Musical works, Artistic works, Cinematograph Films, Sound recordings, and Broadcasts.For your work to be copyrightable, it must be an original work of authorship, and fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Registration is a legal formality, and you can have a protected work without registering, but you can’t assert a civil claim for copyright infringement against someone unless you have registered it.
- PATENT
Patents are typically used for scientific or technological innovations.A patent is a form of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of years in exchange for publishing an enabling public disclosure of the invention.
A patent does not give a right to make or use or sell an invention. Rather, a patent provides, from a legal standpoint, the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention for the term of the patent.
A patent, being an exclusionary right, does not necessarily give the patent owner the right to exploit the invention subject to the patent. For example, many inventions are improvements of prior inventions that may still be covered by someone else’s patent.
If an inventor obtains a patent on improvements to an existing invention which is still under patent, they can only legally use the improved invention if the patent holder of the original invention gives permission, which they may refuse.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
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