Intellectual Property Law

Intellectual Property:

Intellectual property is an intangible property comprising rights in creative and inventive endeavors, or signs, words and symbols that are used to distinguish goods and services in the market place. Intellectual property rights include copyright (rights in literary, musical, artistic, photographic and audiovisual works) and industrial property rights (rights in inventions, trademarks, industrial designs and geographical indications or appellations of origin). Intellectual property law gives creators and inventors certain exclusive rights with respect to their creations and inventions, and provides businesses and consumers alike with confidence that distinctive signs such as trade marks are not used in a way that deceives or misleads the public. These rights are limited in scope and generally in duration to provide a balance between encouraging further intellectual creativity and innovation and enabling access by the community to the products of intellectual property.

Intellectual Property Law in Australia:

IP Australia is the federal government agency in charge for giving way rights in patents, trademarks and designs. By granting these rights, this agency is trying to contribute to the betterment of its Australian citizens by encouraging creative endeavors and innovations in order to compete with the other developing countries globally.

According to Barlow the author of “ The economy of ideas”, information on net is something, which can be easily transmitted and seen without any type of restriction. Products on Internet are totally different as they are not physical. So how can we apply the same protection laws to something, which is not even tangible, as it is not going to do any good? The problems posed by digital media for intellectual property may have first become apparent with software, but the digitization of information, and the resulting ease of duplication and transmission on the Internet, is upsetting the balances struck by intellectual property law. Some people fear that rampant copying on the Internet will make it impossible for authors and publishers to be fairly compensated for their works. Others fear that a tightening of copyright law will destroy the regime of fair use. Computer programs are poorly matched to traditional categories of intellectual property. Are programs inventions, and thus covered by patent law? Are they "original works of authorship," and thus covered by copyright law? Software is particularly troublesome for patent law. On the one hand, machines are patentable, and on the other hand, mathematical algorithms are not. Computer programs are both like machines and like mathematical algorithms, so judges have had to split hairs to distinguish between patentable and non-patentable software elements.

The Internet makes it very to copy digital information and make it available worldwide. This problem first became visible in the 1980s with "software piracy", since software was the first type of information to become commonly available in digital form. As a result, what was once viewed as simple software "sharing" is now widely considered culpable, even criminal behavior. As the Internet is developing, the same issues apply to all kinds of information.

Setbacks with Australian IP Law:

The ethical problems and the term intellectual ...