You’ve all heard the term, but there’s a lot more to it than you think – especially when it comes to laws.
By Craig Falck for Africa Report
Photograph: © Athos Boncompagni | Dreamstime.com
Simply put, and we’re using the Wikipedia definition here; “intellectual property is the term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognised – and the corresponding fields of law. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, artistic works, discoveries and inventions, words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property rights include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions.”
If you can think something up and create it, it becomes your intellectual property, provided you can prove that it’s yours. This is a major problem in the business world these days, where just about everything gets knocked off by cheap manufacturers who use your basic design and flog their cut-price products because people are willing to spend half the cost of the genuine article if they can get something that looks the same and works the same… more or less. Even though there are patents and copyrights and other laws and regulation against copying people’s work, it’s difficult to take action because each country has its own rules and regulations, and when it comes to countries that thrive on cheap labour and running manufacturing factories around the clock, they tend to turn a blind eye when intellectual properties are infringed upon.
The biggest problem with intellectual property rights being violated is the fact that the internet puts the world at anyone’s fingertips. If you write a book and publish one copy in the most remote place on earth, people on the other side of the world will be able to download a digital copy for free… and illegally. Sadly, there’s very little that the owner can do about it because once something’s put onto the world wide web, it’s virtually impossible to get rid of it completely. Someone somewhere will hide it for the rest of the world to find.
Intellectual property is something that you have designed in your mind, dreamt up and created that no one else has done already. It’s yours and if you’re clever, you’ll have it copyrighted and trademarked and patented before the sun goes down. The only problem is that you’re almost guaranteed to have it copied by the time the sun rises again…
