Intellectual property rights

Intellectual property (IP) means creations of the mind: inventions, books, music, art, designs, names and symbols. A famous cartoon character, for instance, began in one person's imagination. Intellectual property rights (IPR) are the legal rights over these creations, which reward their creators and stop others from copying them.

IP is of two broad kinds: industrial property (patents, trademarks, industrial designs and geographical indications) and copyright.

• Copyright: protects literary and artistic works such as books, music, films and software. It arises automatically as soon as the work is created.
• Trademark: a word, name, symbol or design that distinguishes one firm's goods from another's. A small restaurant that copies a famous chain's brand name on its menu will soon receive a legal notice.
• Geographical indication (GI): marks goods whose quality or fame comes from where they are made, such as Darjeeling Tea and Nagpur Orange.
• Patent: an exclusive right over an invention, for 20 years. To be patented, an invention must be new, non-obvious (not something any expert would simply think of) and capable of industrial application. A discovery of something that already exists in nature cannot be patented.
• Design: protects the shape, pattern or look of a product, for 10 years, which can be extended by 5 more.

Other forms of protection: plant varieties (new varieties bred by farmers and breeders), layout designs of integrated circuits (computer chips), traditional knowledge, recorded in India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), and trade secrets (confidential business information).