Unit35. P6

Intellectual Property Intellectual Property is commonly shortened to IP; this is when a person or institution can claim ownership of their work. Intellectual property can be bought, sold, mortgaged or licensed. Intellectual Property may have legal protection where the owner may obtain specific rights. • Know-how and Confidential Information- Know-how is knowledge which may not required strong protection rights, but which has commercial value. Confidential information may also be referred to as a ‘trade secret’. This can be technical, financial, marketing or knowledge of some other form. Commonly it is information which identifies how an industrial process can be in place or how a key technical step may be executed. • Patents -A patent is a contract with the state where in return for disclosing an invention the owner of the patent is given a monopoly right to use that invention for a period of 20 years. After the expiry of a patent anyone can commercialize the invention. A patent is one of the strongest rights for the protection of an invention. • Copyright- Copyright protects the physical expression of ideas. As soon as an idea is given physical form, e.g. a piece of writing, a photograph, music, a film, a web page, it is protected by copyright. There is no need for registration. Protection is automatic at the point of creation. Both published and unpublished works are protected by copyright. Copyright is normally owned by the creators of the work, e.g. an author, composer, artist, photographer etc. If the work is created in the course of a person's employment, then the copyright holder is usually the employer. Copyright is a property right and can be sold or transferred to others. Authors of articles in academic journals, for example, frequently transfer the copyright in those articles to the journal's publisher. It is important not to confuse ownership of a work with ownership of the copyright in it: a person may have acquired an original copyright work, e.g. a painting, letter or photograph, but unless the copyright in it has expressly also been transferred, it will remain with the creator. Copyright Symbol webpage is to help anyone searching for information about the Copyright-C symbol (which is the Circle (C)). Bookmark this page if you find it useful. Hopefully this page will be useful for the basic user who needs it to put a copyright notice on a poem or story, putting a copyright symbol into Photoshop or other adobe documents etc. Phw you won't need to search those clipart sites any more! Through to those looking to insert the copyright symbol using XML, XSL, Texan, Latex, and Java etc... • Design Rights- Design rights give protection to the design of objects. A design may be the appearance of product in whole or in part. Designs can be protected by registered design rights or unregistered design rights. A registered design right is a contract with the state where in return for disclosing an invention the owner of the patent is given a monopoly right to use that invention for a period of 25 years. • Trademark-A Trademark is the means by which a business makes itself visible in the marketplace. A Trademark can be any distinctive (not solely descriptive) name or logo. The best Trademarks are instantly recognizable and conjure up in the minds of existing or potential customers things like quality, dependability, or at the very least the source of the goods or services being bought. A trademark is often defined as: “a word, name, symbol or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others”. A service mark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms "trademark" and "mark" are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and service marks. Trademarks provide their owners with the legal right to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark. They cannot be used stop competitors from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Examples of well-known Trademarks are: Coca-Cola, Rolls-Royce, The Apple logo and the Nike “swoosh”. Trademark (also called trade mark) TM, Registered and Service Mark (or service mark) signs are meaningful popular computer symbols. You can type trademark and registered symbols right from your keyboard. Continue reading and I'll show you how to do that using different techniques on Windows, Mac and Linux. ™ ® ℠