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Written by : Diego Kamb |
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all right we're now going to talk about intellectual property and go through three main ways which it can be protected in the uk so copyright patents and trademarks a lot to get through it's a very complicated topic so we're going to just touch the surface here and try and define these terms but relevant law for insert property in the uk is for copyright designs and patents act of 1988. there are the laws which are connected but this is the main one to be aware of and it's designed to protect what is known as intellectual property shorten often just to ip and protecting it from being stolen is the idea so these are creations of the mind is the phrase often this is quite hard to define to be honest so really anything you're coming up with with your brain so things like articles and magazines digital art films songs and software and so on even hardware designs things like this things which you are coming up with yourself and are different from other people's ideas so we're talking about ideas here not about physical products although they often lead to physical products so without protection from the law like the copyright disaster patents act it makes these things very very easy to steal stealing physical items is i'm sure relatively difficult right stealing a car stealing money from a bank takes quite a lot of effort i would imagine but if selling somebody's idea is very easy somebody could tell you a story and you could steal it somebody could tell you a film idea and you could steal it so without protection easy to steal and if they are easy to steal and there is no punishment you might find in time people who are creative may not take the time and money to innovate people might stop trying to come up with new ideas and new concepts and new art and new software ideas because there is no punishment right people will not bother to make new video games or films or art if a competitor is able just to steal it right after it's been made and so it is really important for intellectual property to be protected and for organizations to be quite careful and have a use other ip and how they go about protecting their own ip so the first term which we need to cover is copyright so copyright is an interesting one because you get copyright automatically right if you produce an original product you get copyright straightaway so there's no application you can assert copyright on anything you do you can make a story and if it is totally yours totally original you can stick a copyright symbol which is what the c is in the circle and assert that it was your original idea often it's phrased well if it's written as the symbol the year it was made in and the company or the person's name afterwards so that's from youtube that picture know what copyright does is prevent other people copying giving away or selling your work without your permission because google have said youtube is their own original work i can't make a clone of youtube and pass it off as my own that would fall found a copyright and i'm sure google would come after me with a big lawsuit now there are some exemptions to copyright and i cannot claim to fully understand the total legal intricacies not if we need to of course but examples of things like education and the government have some exemptions too but also after a set number of years actually the copyright effectively expires and ip can start to enter the public domain so the public domain is the idea that after a certain number of years usually 70 after the death of the person who made it it becomes pretty much public and it's very hard to restrict it anymore so that's why famous paintings and famous novels which are over 70 years old start to appear more often because you are free to use them without much threat of legal action now a similar but different concept in ip are trademarks a trademark exists to protect a brand not just for general idea so a brand is where we have a type of product associated really strongly with a particular name and organization where there are certain logos and certain slogans and certain color schemes we all recognize as being part of a particular company or associated with a particular person that's a brand they're really quite strong so we often see like a tm a tm issue for trademark so the tm symbol shows that a brand is the organization's original ip you can also register it so tm anyone can stick a tm after a name or a slogan or something like that if you've got an r that means it's a registered trademark which means the company has applied to the government and has formally registered it so they've actually proved it is their own ip and the tm on its own is not necessarily proved so to give an example right coco pops is a very very strong brand belong to kellogg's and so the name coco pops because it is something which kellogg's have come up with they can stick a tiny r symbol after it they've applied for a registered trademark and so it is their own brand name it means another company cannot use that particular brand name because it's got its own trademark so tesco with their clone of coco bops cannot use the same name but of course they can use a similar name because it's different to them now they haven't it looks like got a trademark for this possibly because that's risking legal action from kellogg's because it could be seen as being too close otherwise but the actual product is i think we can agree pretty identical but the trademark is what needs to be kept distinct because it's kellogg's intellectual property patents are the third and final term to cover which are different still from copyright and trademarks because patents you must apply to the government and they're much more about unique ideas which we call inventions and invention is something brand new which hasn't been discovered or thought about is the idea so a patent is this legal right which gives exclusive rights over a fixed period of time usually about 20 years so for government i've said okay this is a unique idea you can have a patent you can do what you want with this idea for usually 20 years to give an example apple in america in 2021 registered a patent for a under screen fingerprint scanner for iphones and macbooks how they managed to prove this was unique i'm not quite sure because that's the whole idea you are proving is an invention probably it's not so much about the actual final result probably more about the technology going on inside but having a patent means apple can scrutinize competitors and if apple feel that a competitor has got a very very similar design to their product apple could sue them and it gives them more control over this idea again the kind of reasoning behind it is apple could spend millions and millions of pounds and loads of time coming up with a brand new idea only for another company to steal it so that's a purpose of patents to stop somebody stealing an idea but you've got to prove it's unique enough to be brand new and patients you have to apply for so trademarks and copyright can just be you can just say you've got copyright or it's got a trademark um but a patent has to be registered
Thanks for your comment Cleotilde Hohl, have a nice day.
- Diego Kamb, Staff Member
hi everyone and welcome to my first ever tutorial on intellectual property law the reason why I started making these tutorials so simply because I'm now as a student I tried sometimes to youtube videos and how to understand different concepts and I couldn't find anything so I was thinking maybe there are other students like me out there who have the same problem sometimes I will cover the different aspects of intellectual property law the different types of IP law I will cover the cases and the legislation that covers it and further down the line when I'm doing trademarks I will draw some parallels to compare to US law but more than that it's going to be mainly focused on UK law so to jump into it this first tutorial we're just going to look at an Outlook it or-or-or a kind of the framework of how IP love fits together because I think for many people it is important to realize that IP law it's an area where every separate color that you have different separate rights covering different things but they all interrelate to they all kind of overlap in one way or none or another this is very important to understand because when you're actually going into litigation or when you're when you're dealing with clients etc you need to appreciate that they want results but they don't necessarily care about how so just because something is a design from the outset doesn't mean that you cannot try to register it as a trademark to get more protection so they want results and you need to find the results for them the first write that that I will point out is trademarks law or trademarks now my handwriting is very crap so thank you for bearing with me but you have trademarks which is the first right and what are trademarks when you're dealing with trademarks you're dealing with different things you're dealing with brands for instance you're dealing with with the images you're dealing we're dealing with reputation and what I mean with reputation is when you're talking about trademarks trademarks essentially as they act as a guarantor of origin or indicator of origin so it is something that people use to identify who they are where their goods or services come from what they're trying to sell I mean let's take an example you would have Exxon or or BT or you know Louis Vuitton these kinds of things are trademarks usually you will also have packaging under that I will put the rule get up that people usually refer to so if consumers look at that packaging and think oh wait that comes from this certain someone then Paulson potentially you could trademark that as well you could also potentially Praed trademark designs but to avoid confusion just ignore this one for a second and we'll give back to that when we're dealing with trademarks then you also have design rights designs cover things such as the appearance or its ornamentation its design is very self-explanatory and it's it's not a very big area of IP even though it's very widely used I mean very recently you've had the Apple and and Samsung disputes and the disputes that have been going on for quite some time now about the iPad and how Samsung's a tablet looks the same the general gist is a design covers the appearance then you have copyright and copyright is an interesting one because because sometimes people at least in the UK they misunderstand how copyright works or they don't understand quite how it works they think that people have a copyright in everything and anything I mean I had a friend who told me I have a copyright in my name now you do not have a copyright in your name at least in the UK copyright covers let's call it the creative industry things such as music books ie under that will say literary works so anything literary dramatic work so drama and and play sound recordings and what I mean with sound recordings I mean the recorded sound so so if you think about a song a song you would have lyrics as a literary work you will have music the actual melody but then you'll have a separate copyright for everything recorded which may be owned by someone else etc etc if you've ever asked yourself what protection covers computer software well copyright does so I'll write PC so PC programs the coding the actual coding is covered by copyrights patents is the other one you have and patents but it concerns itself with inventions Stan and many people also quite understand how patents work they think you can patent everything and that's also wrong because you can only patent inventions and invent and invention is only an invention when it's new when it is not obvious when it's capable of industrial applications I'm just going to write industrial application and if it is not excluded because you have certain subject matter which under the patent sock have been deemed to be excluded from protection and the biggest area of patents is the pharmaceutical industry but you also have the technology industry and we're thinking about tech you're thinking about something like cell phones more sorry mobile phones computers speakers you've got big companies that usually have thousands of technology patents you've also got a few other rights which fall under intellectual property well for most of you out there you would not even consider them you would not look at them but they're actually one of the era they're actually quite big areas I mean the influence will quite a lot Neville I have a lot of impact on on certain things one is plant breeders rights the other one is semiconductor chips which can also be covered under patents funnily enough if they satisfy the patent requirement what are semiconductor chips well every computer has got a processor and that processor has a semiconductor chip and it is that chip that's protected by this right much so when you're studying IP law you're mainly covering these four areas now the last thing I want to comment is that you potentially have one more right the reason why I'm saying that potentially is because it is it has been and it is still arguable whether this is an intellectual property right now the law of confidence it protects trade secrets that the definition lies in the name the law of confidence so it is it deals with confidential information I will give you an example and that's the coca-cola recipe so you have the law of confidence the problem with this now I'm not going to only write trade secrets I'm also going to write private information but once you start talking about this you're dealing less with commercial IP law and you're dealing more with you know human rights and then the potential right to privacy or privacy whatever you want to call it general know-how not general know-how sorry about that know how the difference between same general know-how and know-how is that general know-how is just general information know-how might refer to that the steps and in doing things whether the way you do things you know the process of doing things within the company an example of this is one know how might be how MacDonnell's they're made how they make their dressing you know how does McDonald's make their burgers tastes the same almost anywhere in the world so th
Thanks Mickrows your participation is very much appreciated
- Diego Kamb
About the author
I've studied oceanography at Indiana University Kokomo in Kokomo and I am an expert in philosophy of education. I usually feel infuriated. My previous job was directory assistance operator I held this position for 25 years, I love talking about unicycling and ice diving. Huge fan of Gigi Hadid I practice bobsleigh and collect pez.
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