Intellectual property rights and their best-known types

Intellectual property rights empower creators or owners to use an intellectual property asset and prevent others from doing so, with patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets among the best known types. The lessons answer how ideas become protected property and what that protection means. They trace the themes of ownership, expression, disclosure, and incentives.

2 articles, 1 video, 1 book · about 1 hr 58 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   

   intellectual property rights · Wikipedia · 56 min read

   A patent gives an inventor or their successor-in-title the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, and importing an invention for a limited period, in exchange for public disclosure. Patent owners must disclose valuable information about their inventions to enrich public knowledge and stimulate innovation. Copyright may apply to creative, intellectual, or artistic forms, or "works," but not to ideas and information themselves, only to the form or manner in which they are expressed. A trade secret is a formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, or compilation of information not generally known or reasonably ascertainable that can give a business an economic advantage over competitors and customers. In the United States, trade secrets are protected by a combination of state and federal laws prescribing civil and criminal penalties for misappropriation.

2. Read
   "Intellectual Property" · plato.stanford.edu · 50 min read

   A 1421 statute of the Republic of Florence recognized authors' and inventors' rights to the products of their intellectual efforts and built in an incentive mechanism. That mechanism became a prominent feature of Anglo-American intellectual property protection.

3. Watch
   

   Copyright, Exceptions, and Fair Use: Crash Course Intellectual Property #3 · YouTube · 12 min watch

   Copyright is enforced, and it has exceptions such as Fair Use, which can be hard to define.

4. Book
   

   The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution · Bookshop.org

   The Innovators by Walter Isaacson tells the story of digital-age pioneers, hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs, describing how they collaborated and why working as teams made them more creative.

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