Intellectual Property Law refers to the quantity of distinguished types of legal properties covered by both commercial and artistic corresponding fields of law. Under this law, property owners are granted particular rights of exclusivity to various intangible assets such as artistic works, literary, and music. The assets may also involve designs, symbols, phrases, words, inventions, and discoveries. In some jurisdictions, the common types of intellectual property are trade secrets, industrial design rights, patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Basically, intellectual property has four main types: the patents, the copyrights, the trademarks, and the trade secrets. The patents are granted to sovereign entities as incentives for encouragement progress in applied science. The copyright is usually conferred by the Federal Law of the government and is usually based on specific provisions of the Constitution. A trademark refers to words or group of words including logo that are used as distinction in selling goods or products. Meanwhile, a trade secret is an information or idea that consists of commercial value that is not known widely. It may include varieties of business techniques, patterns, formulas, machines, processes, or methods that are kept hidden from other business competitors.
Over the centuries, the legal principles governing the intellectual property laws have evolved. It was in 19th century when the concept of intellectual property was started to be used. During the 20th century, the concept became a common matter in the United States.
Financial incentive is an exclusive rights granted to owners of intellectual property to collect monopoly profits. These profits pay associated research and development and grant financial incentive for the intellectual property’s creation. Another exclusive right granted by the intellectual property laws is the legal monopoly, which is credited with substantial contributions concerning business growth. According to economists, two-thirds of the value of huge business in the United States came from intangible assets.
The intellectual property rights are provisional monopolies implemented by the state regarding use of ideas and expressions. These rights are usually limited to non-rival goods that can be used or enjoyed simultaneously by many people. For instance, clothing can only be used by a single person one at a time.
The creation of intellectual property rights represents a transaction that will balance the society’s interests in the creation of non-rival goods against the issues of monopoly power. Since the relevant benefits and costs to society of these rights will depend on numerous factors that are specific to every society and product.
Some critics of intellectual property laws and rights come from intellectual monopolies and free culture movements. These critics believed that such laws and rights can harm health and progress prevention. They also believed that the benefits are mainly focus on the interests that are damaging to masses. Expansive monopolies covered by these laws and rights are also harmed the public interest in forms of business method patents, software patents, and copyright extensions.
Other criticisms made under intellectual property laws and rights also concern the tendency of protection to expand the property both in scope and in duration. Moreover, creators and controllers of the laws and rights tend to bring in more items under protection.