Intellectual Property Law



Intellectual Property Law

Introduction

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, intellectual property involves creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. It can be divided into two categories:

Industrial property, including trademarks; and

Copyright, including literary and artistic works. Intellectual property law is full of careful balances between what is set aside for the owner and what is left in the public domain. The U.S. Congress grants the power to protect the intellectual property rights of authors, artists, and inventors by granting them exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries. A copyright, trademark, or patent owner may grant its use to others for a fee. Professional trade associations such as the American Bar Association dedicate entire divisions to intellectual property law.

Intellectual property has some important characteristics. Firstly, unlike material property, the enjoyment of it by one person does nothing to damage or exclude the enjoyment of it by other people. Intellectual property does not get 'used up'. This means that pricing of intellectual property is challenging, and typically has to deviate from marginal-cost pricing. A second feature is that intellectual property is hard to appropriate for private gain — inventions can be copied, pop songs pirated. The existence of patents, copyright law, trademarks and registered designs can provide some legal protection, but enforcement is hard and litigation can be protracted. Arguments over intellectual property appear to be increasing. A third feature is that markets in intellectual property do not function well. If an individual tries to sell a television game show format to a large television network, he faces the challenge of either persuading the network to buy the format without knowing what it is, or persuading it to pay for the idea once he has told them what it is, when there is little practical method of proving they had not thought of it themselves. Some of these problems also arise when trying to estimate brand equity. This paper critically assesses the extent the ambit of the integrity right in Intellectual Property Law. Furthermore, the paper assesses its relationship with the potential defence of parody.

The term intellectual property refers to monopoly rights held in intangible products or creations. According to U.S. law, IP is the bundle of monopolies held in immaterial goods and services, such as inventions, literary or artistic expressions, musical compositions, business goodwill or reputation, and industrial designs. While these immaterial objects are usually embodied in physical form—and often must be in a tangible form to obtain IP protection at law—the rights are held in the immaterial, or intangible, value within the goods and services, rather than in the tangible embodiment of the physical item.

Another way of conceiving IP is to think of the rights as a bundle of sticks, each representing an exclusive right held by the original author, inventor, or company (or by their licensees or transferees) in creative outputs—that is, in products of the mind. Instead of owning a physical chair, the copyright holder owns exclusive rights in the design ...