Legal Articles Covering Legal Topics

What is Intellectual Property?
by: Stuart Simpson

Intellectual Property is the product of your thinking that can be used for commercial value. In other words, you think of a song and write down the words – you have the legal right to prevent others from copying or making a song based on your lyrics. This right you have can make you money if someone is willing to pay you for your song. Maybe your boss asked you to write a computer program. Who owns the work? You may have designed a new mouse trap and have the design on computer. Or you have created a distinctive logo for your company. But Intellectual Property goes deeper than songs or even copyrights. Let’s examine the four main areas of Intellectual Property law: Trade Secrets, Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents.

Trade secrets give the owner a competitive edge. If some information has value to competitors and they don’t know about it – then it’s a trade secret. If the information was not kept reasonably safe (secret) then it’s not a trade secret. Trade secrets may be sold with the business or stolen from bad employees. Maybe a former employee didn’t sign a non-disclosure statement before going to work at the competition. Some also reverse engineer software to gain the source code. This highly protected source code for computers is their trade secret, giving them an advantage over the competition. The trick is you have to keep your trade secrets as such, secrets.

Copyrights protect all kinds of writing by singers, writers, programmers, artists, etc… These are the best known of all intellectual property. Registering with the US Copyright office can enhance the automatic protection. You must have your copyright material on paper, tape, or computer. Copyright protection applies to the “literal expression.