Intellectual Property (IP) is a very important tool used by government to promote innovation and economic development. Businesses can use IP rights to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Therefore, it is important that business owners and managers have an understanding of what IP is, and how it can be used to their advantage.

WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, defines Intellectual Property as:

Intellectual property, very broadly, means the legal rights which result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields.

Protecting Intellectual Property recognizes the rights that a person has to the results of their intellectual activity. It also promotes creativity, and encourages the sharing of the results of creative work, by ensuring that the rights to these creative works is protected.

Intellectual Property is of several types:

• Patents

• Copyrights

• Trademarks

• Industrial Designs and Integrated Circuits

• Trade Secrets

Patents are intended to protect new and useful inventions. They grant the inventor the right to exclude others from making, using, selling or importing the invention for a certain period of time, which is usually 20 years from the date of filing the patent. In exchange for giving the inventor a time limited monopoly to practice and benefit from the invention, full disclosure of the invention and how it works is required. Patents encourage inventors to innovate and create new and useful products by ensuring that they will economically benefit from doing so. At the same time, by requiring inventors to disclose their invention, patents promote innovation in general as other people can learn from and improve upon the inventions of others.

Copyrights provide protection for creative, intellectual or artistic works, such as literary works, music, movies, paintings, and even software. Copyrights do not protect the information itself, but rather the form in which the information is expressed. For example, copyright protects software code from being directly copied, but does not protect the ideas or functionality that the software provides if the software code is re-written in a new form.

Trademarks are defined by WIPO as: “a sign, or a combination of signs, which distinguishes the goods or services of one enterprise from those of another”. A trademark gives an owner the right to prevent unauthorized use of their mark, or a confusingly similar mark. This is intended to allow them to protect their brand and to prevent the public from being misled about products or services. Trademarks can be renewed indefinitely as long as the owner continues to pay the required fees.

Industrial Designs protect the ornamental or aesthetic aspect of a useful article. Industrial Designs must be reproducible by industrial means. By registering the Industrial Design of their product, companies can protect the visual appeal of their product which may differentiate it from other products on the market, thereby giving them a competitive edge in the marketplace. Industrial Designs must be new and useful to be registered.

Trade Secrets are a slightly different form of intellectual property. They are business secrets that provide an advantage in the marketplace. Trade secrets do not have a specified term, like patents for example. However, since they are not formally registered, no protection is provided if someone independently develops the same methods or ideas protected by a trade secret. Trade secrets therefore only provide protection from unlawful or improper methods such as industrial espionage.