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Intellectual property, or IP, is property of an intangible nature: it is created by statute (usually federal), and consists of a bundle of specific legal rights provided by those statutes. An intellectual property, such as a patent or copyright, is distinct from the invention that is patented or the work of authorship that is copyrighted.
The specific rights attached to an intellectual property vary with the type of IP but, like rights attached to other kinds of property, include the right to exclude others from the property unless conditions acceptable to the IP owner are met. In the case of patents and copyrights, the rights are temporary, and are designed to provide an incentive to create new inventions and works of authorship.
Under a right to temporarily exclude others, an intellectual property owner might engage in a sometimes costly process to "develop" the property by manufacturing the patented invention, or printing the copyrighted work of authorship, for eventual sale to others. Alternately, an IP owner might charge a rent (license fee) in return for an agreement not to sue the tenant (licensee) for trespassing (infringing) on the intellectual property. In that way, the licensee may be in a position to develop the intellectual property and sell the resulting goods or services to the public.
A patent provides a limited-term monopoly to the inventors of new, useful and non-obvious inventions, which might include a process, machine, manufactured item, or composition of matter (including non-human living matter), all of which are defined very broadly by the courts. Patents can also protect any new, useful and non-obvious improvement on an existing invention. Patents are not issued on ideas, or on unmodified discoveries of naturally occurring phenomena.
A copyright provides a limited-term monopoly to the authors of original artistic and creative works, such as writings (including computer programs), paintings, written or recorded music, etc. The protection applies only to the original expression, not to the ideas or concepts embodied in the expression.
A simplified comparison of patents and copyrights is provided in the accompanying table.
New varieties of plants that are sexually reproduced (by seed) or are tuber-propagated may be accorded protection through the Plant Variety Protection Act, as administered through the PVP Office. Without permission of the owner, others are prohibited from selling, marketing, offering, delivering, consigning, exchanging, or exposing the protected variety for sale.
Universities have a mission to disseminate the new knowledge they create, but sometimes find it necessary or advantageous to control the timing and flow of some types of technical information. In that case, the technical information is treated as intellectual property.
A single innovation might be subject matter for more than one type of intellectual property, as might be the case for a novel, useful, and non-obvious process (patentable invention) that was expressed in lines of computer software that were original and fixed in some tangible medium (copyrighted work of authorship).
Intellectual property laws differ somewhat from country to country, as do views on appropriate use of intellectual property. For an international perspective, see The World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO.
