What is Intellectual Property?

Today, I do not have the tutorial class for the business law. Therefore, I have extra time to prepare the interview for my industrial training. For the interview, I have to understand about the trademark, patent and copyright since the firm provide services that related with intellectual property registrations.

Intellectual Property (IP) is a word to refer a number of discrete types of legal monopolies over creations of the mind, both artistic and commercial, and the corresponding fields of law. Owners are granted certain exclusive rights to diversity of intangible assets such as musical, literary, and artistic works, discoveries and inventions, and words, phrases, symbols and designs. The general types of intellectual property include trademarks, copyrights and patents.

Trademark is a unique sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers which the trademark appears originate from a distinctive source, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities.

Trademark can divide to 3 categories:

• ™ is used for an unregistered trademark. This is a mark used to promote or brand goods.
• ℠ is used for unregistered service mark. This is a mark used to promote or brand services.
• ® is used for a registered trademark.

Trademark is a type of intellectual property. Normally, trademark can be a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image or a combination of these elements.

Copyright is the set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. The symbol for copyright is ©.

Copyright is also a part of intellectual property along with patents and trademarks.

Patent is a set of exclusive right granted by a state or national government to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a public disclosure of an invention.

Under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of WTO (World Trade Organization), patents should be available in WTO member states for any inventions, in all fields of technology, and the term of protection available should be the minimum 20years.

We should respect the intellectual property since the individual was put a lot of affords to create the intellectual property. Therefore, we should avoid to buy the pirates products and buy an original products. At the same time, I hope that my interview will be success.

Prepared by,
Fong Yok Yan (1071120015)