For students who are looking forward to making a career in the field of ‘business law,’ here is a curated list of all the intellectual property (IP) rights that you can help your clients with in the future.
What are IPs or Intellectual Property rights ??
Intellectual Property rights are given to individuals or organizations for their works in the field of arts, literature, inventions, trademarks, and designs.
An individual or organization gets a legal right on their ‘brain child – intellectual property,’ and that gives them a legal intellectual property right on that.
Types of Intellectual Property Rights:
- Patents: For new, innovative and creations/inventions the inventor gets a patent for a specific period of time, under which no one can make, sell or use their invention without their permission. Usually research scholars, scientists, inventors get legal patents, nevertheless, it could be assigned to any kind of inventor.
- Copyrights: Copyrights are legal protection given to creators on their literary works, illustrations, paintings, designs, logos, softwares, music, and cinema. If in case someone wishes to use their creation they need to take signed permission from the copyright holder or pay them to buy the copyright.
- Trademarks: In simple terms trademarks help make brands distinctive. Trademarks are legal rights related to brand names, logos, icons, slogans, or even jingles. For example: the bottle shape of CocaCola is a registered trademark of Coca Cola.
- Trade Secrets: Trade Secrets are legal protection of a company’s data like recipes, techniques, list of clients, manufacturing process.
- Industrial Designs: Industrial design is the legal protection to a product’s aesthetic, physical aspects like shape, color, fragrance.
Why are IPs needed ??
- Direct legal protection to creators, inventors, artists or brands against someone claiming, misusing or copying their brain-child.
- Economic benefits
- Encouragement for innovation across the world without any fears.
Challenges to IPs
- Complexity and overlapping nature of Intellectual property rights. For example, trademarks and industrial design laws seem similar.
- Counterfeiting and Piracy, since it is now super easy to copy creations. International luxury brands like Puma, Adidas, Zara, Gucci and Louis Vuitton face a lot of problems across the world because of their copies being manufactured across the world.
Dear students, you should be well aware of these laws in order to help your clients fight with piracy, and copyright infringement issues.