Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are crucial for innovation. It is the foundation of any knowledge-based economy. It is the interface of - creations and rights. It pervades through all sectors of the economy and is increasingly becoming important for ensuring the competitiveness of the enterprise. Role of IPR lay in providing a legal right to the inventor to protect his/her creation as well as preventing others from illegally exploiting the creation and thus avoid re-invention of the wheel.

The various tools of IPR that are used to protect innovations are:-

• Copyright: is concerned with the protection of creative works that are musical, literary, artistic, lectures, plays, art reproductions, models, photographs, computer software, etc.

• Patent: pertains to pragmatic innovations and aims to protect inventions that are novel, non-obvious and useful.

• Trademark: is related to commercial symbols and concern to protect distinctive marks such as words/signs including personal names, letters, numerals, figurative elements (logos); devices; visually perceptible two or three dimensional signs/shapes or their combinations; audible signs (sound marks) e.g. the cry of an animal or laughing sound of a baby; olfactory marks (smell marks), use of certain fragrance.

• Industrial Designs: protects novel nonfunctional features of shape, configuration, pattern, ornamentation or composition of lines or colours, applied to an article either two or three dimensional or in both forms by any industrial process or means whether manual, mechanical or chemical, separate or combined which in the finished article appeal to and are judged solely by the eye.

• Geographical Indications (GI): are defined as that aspect of the industrial property, which refers to the country or to a place of origin of that product. Typically, such a name conveys an assurance of quality and distinctiveness of the product, which is essentially attributable to the fact of its origin in that defined geographical locality, region or country.

Intellectual Property Rights are always territorial. Globalization and rapid proliferation of technology have elevated the importance of intellectual property rights.