What Is An Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property is the creative ideas originating from your mind and used in commerce.   Such as Designs, images, and symbols. Intellectual property is protected by law like; Copyright, Patents, and trademarks provide a legal license for your creations.

You can take financial advantage of your Intellectual property in your businesses. The IP system aims to promote an environment in which creativity and innovation can grow.

Types Of Intellectual Property:

The intellectual property contains 6 important types that we are going to discuss below one by one.

1. Copyrights
2. Patents
3. Trademark
4. Trade secrets

1. Intellectual Property- Copyrights:
Copyright is a legal term that protects your creative expression. Copyright protects your creativity and works such as books, songs, websites, artistic works, computers, and software.

It provides you the authority to modify, distribute, display, and perform the work according to your convenience.

The difficulty lies in proving you were the first to create it. You can register your product under copyright law by paying registration fees for the same.

This copyrighted work will be beneficial for a lifetime period.

Copyrights don’t protect the information found in a book or on a website, but they protect the layout and presentation.

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2. Intellectual Property- Patent:
A patent indicates a completely new invention of a very useful work to all. This new invention allows the patent holder to keep out others from the same invention.

A patent is useful for all businesses because it is a unique way of achieving success. It differentiates your business and your type of work from the market.  A design patent stays for 14 to 20 years.

No one can copy your registered patent and if anyone does then a patent holder can take legal action against that.

Without patent protection, anyone can use or copy your design, content, processes, and everything related to your work.

So, you need to register your patents before any other organizations can file a patent for the work.

Before filing a patent you should know that the patent application process is somehow difficult and for that, you have to pay thousands of dollars.

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3. Intellectual Property- Trademark:
A trademark is a phrase or a symbol that denotes an object’s source. Its name is associated with quality.

Before registering a trademark conduct a search whether the same trademark already exists or not.

Before applying for a trademark you should be very clear about your work, product, processes, and ideas to which the mark will apply.

Trademarks will remain for 10 years and after that, you have to renew the trademark.

You can submit an online application for registering a trademark and upon its approval, you can legally add the registered trademark symbol to your product.

4. Intellectual Property- Trade Secret:
A trade secret is a process that is governed by state laws and it differs from state to state.

Trade secrets are the processes or formulas that most organizations keep very secret and confidential to give them additional benefits from their businesses.

To keep the processes secure organizations use a nondisclosure agreement which is a confidential agreement. Here are some of the popular examples of the trade secret.

1. KFC’s original recipe
2. Search algorithms
3. Coca-Cola’s Coke formula

Protecting yourself and your business is the best way to make sure that no one else can use your distinctive innovations and other ideas.

It is important to remember that copyrights and patents grant rights to the creator of their unique design, not the company that employs them.

So if you hire someone to design your website, the creator owns it if you have the copyright assigned to you.

This is why many business owners say that their contracts with employees or anything valuable created during the time of the company and the company’s money will belong to the company. “You don’t have it if you get it in writing,” warns McQueeney.