What is Intellectual Property Law?

Intellectual property very broadly indicates the legal rights which consequence from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Countries have laws to guard intellectual property for two main reasons. One is to provide statutory expression to the moral and economic rights of creators in their creations in addition to the rights of the public in access to those creations. The second is to encourage, as a deliberate act of Government policy, creativity as well as the dissemination and application of its results and to support fair trading which would contribute to economic in addition to social development.

Generally intellectual property law endeavors at safeguarding creators and other producers of intellectual goods and services by granting them assured time-limited rights to control the use made of those productions. Those rights do not affect to the physical object in which the creation may be embodied but instead to the intellectual creation as such. This property is usually divided into two branches, “industrial property” and “copyright.”

The Convention beginning the World Intellectual Property Organization completed in Stockholm on July 14, 1967 declares that intellectual property shall include rights relating to literary, artistic and scientific works, inventions in all fields of human endeavor, scientific discoveries, industrial designs, trademarks, service marks and commercial names and designations, protection against unfair competition as well as all other rights resulting from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary or artistic fields.

The areas mentioned as literary, artistic and scientific works fit in to the copyright branch of intellectual property. The areas mentioned as performances of performing artists, phonograms as well as broadcasts are frequently called “related rights,” that is, rights related to copyright. The areas referred as inventions, industrial designs, trademarks, service marks and commercial names and designations comprise the industrial property branch of intellectual property. The expression “industrial property” indicates inventions as well as industrial designs. Merely stated, inventions are new solutions to technical problems and industrial designs are aesthetic creations determining the form of industrial products. In addition, industrial property includes trademarks, service marks, commercial names plus designations, including indications of source and appellations of origin and defense against unfair competition.

The World Intellectual Property Organization is one of the particular agencies of the United Nations. The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization was signed at Stockholm in 1967 and came into force in 1970. Though, the origins of WIPO go back to 1883 and 1886, with the acceptance of the Paris Convention and the Berne Convention correspondingly. Equally of these conventions provided for the establishment of international secretariats and both were placed under the supervision of the Swiss Federal Government. The few officials who were needed to hold out the administration of the two conventions were situated in Berne, Switzerland.