From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property

What is intellectual property?

From the course: Understanding Intellectual Property

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What is intellectual property?

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- What is intellectual property law? Virtually everybody knows something about property. If you own a home, you know something about real property, and you probably know something about personal property. That's the things you probably have in your house. These are tangible things. That's how we think of property in most cases. But what about intangible property? What about the things that are invisible that can also be considered property? We call those things intellectual property, and there's a body of law that helps define what intellectual property is. That's what we call intellectual property law. Intellectual property law is broken down into five major groups. There's patent law, which most people have heard of. Patents protect useful utilitarian devices. They need to be novel, things that have not been done before. In the early industrialization period, patents would've been used to protect printing technologies. Patents enabled inventors like Thomas Edison to protect early electrical innovations. Thousands of inventions over the past hundred years have helped revolutionize the world. And now patents are used to protect computer software, web applications, pharmaceuticals, and consumer products. Trademarks are another type of intangible property protected under intellectual property law. This is an area of intellectual property that protects the brand name of things. Trademark law covers things like what you call the product or what you call your company. It includes a slogan that you use for your company and the design of the logo that you use. In some cases, it's the colors that you use or the shape of your packaging. Copyright law covers original works of authorship, so a book, a poem, painting, video, photography, a sculpture, or even computer code. These are all things that are original works of authorship that have become fixed in a tangible form. IP law protects these things under the category of copyright law. There's also an area of intellectual property law called trade Secret law. Trade secret is a body of law that protects anything that has value and has been kept secret. We've probably heard of the secret formula to Coke. Big companies have secret formulas for weed killers and pesticides. Trade secret might cover the secret formula to Colonel Sanders secret recipe for crispy chicken. That's trade secret law. And finally, rights of publicity is a rather new area of intellectual property law that covers the rights somebody has in their name, their likeness, their persona, and even their voice. So these five categories are what we refer to as intellectual property law.

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