Your intellectual property includes the intangible assets you create for your company, such as names, designs, and automated processes. And just like tangible possessions, such as supplies, equipment, buildings and inventory, intellectual property contributes to the value and success of your business. Therefore, it is necessary to control and protect it. In effect, intellectual property laws grant the creator of a new and unique product or idea a temporary monopoly on its use.
In addition, investments in intellectual property suffer from appropriation problems, while a landlord can surround their land with a sturdy fence and hire armed guards to protect it, an information producer or intellectual property can generally do very little to prevent their first buyer from replicating and selling it to a lower price. While it is an intangible asset, intellectual property can be much more valuable than the physical assets of a company. Fundamentally, in-house lawyers must take steps to protect trademarks by actively pursuing infringers who use the brand or a similar brand and ensuring that the brand does not become generic in the public mind (e.g., “band-aid”). In fact, the member countries that signed the GATT committed themselves to a higher degree of intellectual property protection than had been envisaged in any previous multinational treaty.
The German equivalent was used with the founding of the North German Confederation, whose constitution gave legislative power over the protection of intellectual property (Schutz des geistigen Eigentums) to the confederation. Companies are diligent when it comes to identifying and protecting intellectual property because it has a very high value in today's increasingly knowledge-based economy. Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes the intangible creations of the human intellect. In the United States alone, for example, studies over the past decade have estimated that more than 50 percent of U.
Until recently, the purpose of intellectual property law was to provide the least possible protection to encourage innovation. For example, if you have a revolutionary water bottle that you think would benefit the masses, you must protect this intellectual property by declaring to the patent office that the idea is unique and your own. While intellectual property rights may seem to provide a minimal amount of protection, when used wisely, they can maximize the benefit and value of an invention and allow a technology that changes the world to be developed, protected and monetized. In civil law jurisdictions, intellectual property is often referred to as intellectual rights, traditionally a slightly broader concept that has included moral rights and other personal protections that cannot be bought or sold.
Intellectual property is a broad and categorical description of the set of intangible assets that are owned and legally protected by a company or individual against external use or implementation without consent. Other recent developments in intellectual property law, such as the United States Inventions Act, emphasize international harmonization.
