BU - Office of Technology Development - Technology Transfer - Invention

Types of Intellectual Property Protection

Intellectual Property is any product of the human mind that has commercial value. It is a very broad term and includes writings, works of art, lyrics, songs, recordings of performances, formulas, ingredients, skills, know-how, software, designs, plants, plasmids, microorganisms, structures, and so forth.

There is legal protection for most types of intellectual property. The U.S. Constitution states:

“Congress shall have the Power... to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

In other words, the Constitution actually sanctions a monopoly – something it does very rarely – so that Inventors will disclose their inventions in full rather practicing them secretly (e.g., the Coca Cola formula, the best known trade secret in modern American business). The Inventors receive a monopoly on the use of the invention for a defined period of time and in return, society, including other inventors, has access to the information to improve on it further. The Founding Fathers believed that the technological base of the country would advance more rapidly if inventors were provided an incentive to disclose all the details of their inventions to the public. To provide an incentive for them to do so, the government agreed to allow inventors to exclude others from practicing their inventions for an extended period.
This period of monopoly provides the motivation necessary to entice people or companies to invest in (or take a risk on) new ideas or technologies. A strong legal system provides the protection necessary to enforce a limited monopoly and allow the investor to achieve a return on their investment. The limited monopoly however is contingent upon making those ideas publicly available so that others can improve upon them thereby promoting “the progress of science and useful arts”.

The primary legal mechanisms for protection of intellectual property are:

Patents
Copyright
Trademark
Know-how
Trade Secret
Mask Works

Other forms of intellectual property such as know-how may have considerable commercial value but they do not have any particular protection under the law, except in the case of contracts between parties (e.g. a consulting agreement) that specifically refer to such intellectual property.

This Site