KEY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ISSUES

Intellectual property protection isn’t as simple as declaring ownership of a particular product or asset. In most countries, there are four primary types of intellectual property (IP) that can be legally protected: patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Each has their own attributes, requirements and costs.

Before narrowing your focus on which form of protection to use, know that these forms of protection are not mutually exclusive. Depending on what you’re doing, you might be able to use a “belt & suspenders” approach and apply multiple forms of protection, or one approach might be the most sensible. 

THE 4 MAIN TYPES OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Patent

Used to protect inventive ideas or processes – things that are new, useful and nonobvious -  patents are what most often come to mind when thinking of IP protection. Patents are also used to protect newly engineered plant species or strains, as well.

Trademark

A trademark is unlike a patent in that it protects words, phrases, symbols, sounds, smells and color schemes. Trademarks are often considered assets that describe or otherwise identify the source of underlying products or services that a company provides, such as the MGM lion roar, the Home Depot orange color scheme, the Intel Inside logo, and so on.

Copyright

Copyrights do not protect ideas, but rather the manner in which ideas are expressed (“original works of authorship”) - written works, art, music, architectural drawings, or even programming code for software (most evident nowadays in video game entertainment). With certain exceptions, copyrights allow the owner of the protected materials to control reproduction, performance, new versioning or adaptations, public performance  and distribution of the works.

Trade Secret

Trade secrets are proprietary procedures, systems, devices, form

ulas, strategies or other information that is confidential and exclusive to the company using them. They act as competitive advantages for the business.

Why is Intellectual Property Important?

Intellectual property protection is critical to fostering innovation. Without protection of ideas, businesses and individuals would not reap the full benefits of their inventions and would focus less on research and development. Similarly, artists would not be fully compensated for their creations and cultural vitality would suffer as a result.