Concept and meaning of Intellectual Property

You buy a film ticket, and the cinema owns nothing you leave with except a seat for three hours. You buy a pirated DVD outside the station and feel you have bought the film. You have not. The disc is yours; the film is not. The law treats the thing you can touch and the idea it carries as two different kinds of property. This topic explains the second kind, and why a whole branch of law exists to protect something nobody can hold in their hands.

In two minutes

Intellectual property is the body of legal rights that protects the products of human intellect (inventions, brands, designs, literary and artistic works, information) by giving the creator or owner a limited, exclusive right to control their use.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Intellectual Property Laws on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.