Intellectual Property Laws
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- Matters related to Copy right
- Infringement of trade marks
- Passing off
- All maters related to patent, trade mark and copy rights.
Intellectual Property Laws
Intellectual property rights are a bundle of exclusive rights over creations of the mind, both artistic and commercial. The former is covered by copy right laws, which protect creative works such as books, movies, music, paintings, photographs, and software and gives the copyright holder exclusive right to control reproduction or adaptation of such works for a certain period of time.
The second category is collectively known as "industrial properties", as they are typically created and used for industrial or commercial purposes. A patent may be granted for a new, useful, and non-obvious ,invention, and gives the patent holder a right to prevent others from practicing the invention without a license from the inventor for a certain period of time. A trademark is a distinctive sign which is used to prevent confusion among products in the marketplace.
An industrial design protects the form of appearance, style or design of an industrial object from infringement. A trade seceret is non-public information concerning the commercial practices or proprietary knowledge of a business. Public disclosure of trade secrets may sometimes be illegal.
The term "intellectual property" denotes the specific legal rights described above, and not the intellectual work itself.
Purpose
Intellectual property rights give creators exclusive right to their creations, thereby providing an incentive for the author or inventor to develop and share the information rather than keep it secret. The legal protections granted by IP laws are credited with significant contributions toward economic growth.
Intellectual property rights are considered by economists to be a form of temporary monopoly enforced by the state (or enforced using the legal mechanisms for redress supported by the state).
Intellectual property rights are usually limited to non- rival goods, that is, goods which can be used or enjoyed by many people simultaneously - the use by one person does not exclude use by another. This is compared to rival goods, such as clothing, which may only be used by one person at a time. For example, any number of people may make use of a mathematical formula simultaneously. Some objections to the term intellectual property are based on the argument that "property" can only properly be applied to rival goods (or that one cannot "own" property of this sort).
Since a non-rival good may be used (copied, for example) by many simultaneously (produced at zero marginal cost in economic terms), producers would have no incentive to create such works. Monopolies, by contrast, also have inefficiencies (producers will charge more and produce less than would be socially desirable).
The establishment of intellectual property rights therefore represents a trade-off, to balance the interest of society in the creation of non-rival goods (by encouraging their production) with the problems of monopoly power. Since the trade-off and the relevant benefits and costs to society will depend on many factors that may be specific to each product and society, the optimum period of time during which the temporary monopoly rights exist is unclear.
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Modern usage of the term "intellectual property" began with the 1967 establishment of the WIPO), but it did not enter popular usage until passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.
The earliest use of the term "intellectual property" appears to be an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown. in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears." (1 Woodb. & M. 53, 3 West.L.J. 151, 7 F.Cas. 197, No. 3662, 2 Robb.Pat.Cas. 303, Merw.Pat.Inv. 414). The statement that "discoveries are...property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years". In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned "propriété intellectuelle" in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846.
The concept's origins can potentially be traced back further. Jewish Law includes several considerations whose effects are similar to those of modern intellectual property laws, though the notion of intellectual creations as "property" does not seem to exist. The Talmud contains the first known example of codifying a prohibition against the stealing of ideas, which is further discussed in the Sulchan Aruch.
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