Intellectual Property which includes the result of intangible creation of human intellect like Patent, copyright, trademark, inventions, artistic works,designs,and symbols, names and images used in commerce.

IP can be view as:

Industrial property :- includes patents, trademarks and industrial designs

Copyright:- includes literary and artistic works. Ideas cannot be copyrighted

The first intellectual property law was patent law. In 1790, Congress passed the first patent laws. These laws were come after European patent common law. George Washington on July 31, 1790 signed the United States Patent Grant. In 1790, Thomas Jefferson issued the first American patent and the price of a patent was four dollars.

1. Patents:

A patent may be a sort of right granted by the govt. to an inventor, giving the owner the right to exclude others from creating, using, selling, giving to sell, and importing an invention for a limited period of time , in exchange for the general public disclosure of the invention.
Patents are grants from the government to give exclusive rights to make, use, and sell a product for 20 years .

Their attributes includes:-

1. Strong protection
2. Total exclusivity .

Drawbacks:-

1. Long expensive,
2. Technical processes
3. Inventors must make all the details of their product known to the public.
4. One must apply to the Federal government for a patent.

Patents protects

1. Novel,
2. Useful, non obvious and intangible ideas.
An invention is a solution to a specific technological problems, that can be a product or a process and generally has to fulfil three main requirements: it has to be new, not obvious and its needs to be an industrial applicability.

2. Copyright:

• Copyrights protect all written pieces including, but not limited to: books, songs and music, theater productions including all music, movies and letters, etc.
• It is very easy to obtain as one finishes writing a piece, the piece has been copyrighted.
• A copyright provides the inventor of an original work exclusive rights to that, usually for a limited time.Copyright could apply to a large variety of inventive, intellectual, or artistic forms, or works.