Intellectual Property Rights:

 Property:- Any thing that can be owned is called as property. Property in its wider sense
constitutes all proprietary rights(exclusive rights of a person enjoyed by him/her due to ownership
of a property)belonging to a person. Important characteristics of the property are possession,
enjoyment and transferability.

 Physical Property-: A physical property is any aspect of an object that can be measured or
perceived without changing it’s identity. Physical properties are referred to as observables. It is
not a modal property.

 Intellectual Property-: Intellectual property (IP) is a term referring to a number of distinctive

types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are conferred to a person or
group of persons/organizations by the Government of a sovereign nation. Under intellectual
property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as
inventions, musical, literary, and artistic works; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs.
Common types of intellectual property rights include patents, copyrights, trademarks, industrial
design rights, geographical indications and trade secrets etc.

 It is traditionally divided in to two branches, (i) industrial property, (ii) copyright. The holders of
these legal entitlements may exercise various exclusive rights in relation to the subject matter of
the Intellectual Property. The term Intellectual property reflects the idea that this subject matter is
the product of the mind or the Intellect.

Difference between Intellectual and Physical Property-:

 Physical property is the legal translation of something that exists de facto for physical assets:
possession. We need to owe them for our necessity. But nobody can have it unlimited as physical
property basically is limited and everybody needs these. It therefore needs to be restricted in the
form of regulation. Or else there is the possibility of us fighting for its possession that may lead to
a fatal end.

 Imagine a world where when a person gives half of his food to any other person, and magically,
don't loose anything. Will he still refuse to share it with others? Ideas are like that. If you share
them, you still have them in their entirety. So there is no imperious necessity for intellectual
property, or any form of regulation over “intellectual possession”.

 Hence there is no parallelism between physical property and “intellectual property”.

Why should Intellectual Property be well protected-:

 There are two major reasons to protect the Intellectual Property. They are-: (i) To give statutory
expression to the moral and economic rights of creators in their creations and such rights of the
public in access to those creations, (ii) To promote creativity and the dissemination and
application of its result to encourage fair trading which would contribute to economic and social
development as it is a deliberate act of governmental policy.
 The Paris convention states that “any act of competition contrary to honest practices in industrial
and commercial matters constitutes an act of unfair competition”.

 Inventions provide the solution to technical problems and industrial designs are aesthetic
(beautiful) creations determining the appearance of industrial products. So, to check the unfair
competition it is necessary to protect the industrial property (new inventions, industrial design,
trademarks, service marks, commercial names & designations) and as it is a part of intellectual
property as said above.

 Copyright deals with the rights of intellectual creators in their creation. There are some artistic
and literary creations such as music or poem, whose forms of expression of ideas such as,
arrangement of words, musical notes, are protected through copyright law. It is necessary to
protect the owner of rights in artistic works from those who “copy” their ideas in order to
promote healthy competition as well as to protect against unfair competition. As artistic creations
promote and enrich the national cultural heritage it must be protected.

 Whether it be inventions or artistic creations both of these flourish in a healthy atmosphere which
guarantees them greater incentives and better recognition that is their due. On the contrary the
absence of well protected intellectual property rights will debar such genius from getting their due
recognition and incentives and discourage them by encouraging unfair competition like copying
or misusing these without proper sanction and authority by dishonest persons.