What is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property (IP) is a legal term, describing the fact that people can acquire rights as a result of their creativity and innovation. Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are legal rights granted by law to people who have made an original creative work (e.g. writing, art or sculpture, film, music, designs, inventions, etc). IPRs give the creators of such works a qualified monopoly over the ways in which the created work might be used to make money. These rights are granted in law to all original creative works, no matter what their artistic qualities, i.e. whether done by famous artists or children in school, or stage of completion.

Owning IP rights is different from owning objects both because IP rights generally do not last for ever, and because IP rights often exist in the idea or creativity behind something rather than in the object itself. IP is actually a cluster of intangible rights. You can therefore sell a sculpture or book without selling your IP rights over it. And several kinds of rights can be associated with the same work. For example, the author of a book may own the moral right to be identified as the author and the copyright in the expression of the ideas in the book. The publisher may own the copyright in the typographic layout of the book.

Underlying IP law is the general idea that people who create original works should be recognised as the authors of these works and receive benefit from money generated by the commercial use of these works. IP law therefore provides a way of regulating how IP rights are established, how works protected by the law can be used, and how unauthorised use can be prevented. To varying degrees, IP law can protect rights to original ideas, inventions, industrial designs, methods and processes, computer programs, artworks, music, books, films and so on. The chief categories of IP are patents, trademarks, copyrights, industrial designs, performance rights, confidential know-how, and arguably some types of communally-held traditional knowledge.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) website has useful general information on IP.
There are several mechanisms used to manage IP rights: copyright, patents, industrial designs and trademarks. The rights associated with a creative work are often a bundle of different rights, ceded to different people by the original creator. Use this table to find out what kinds of IP rights you will be dealing with in your sector.

Copyright
Patents
Trademarks
Industrial Designs
Performer’s rights

The whole question of intellectual property really arose with the introduction of mechanisms for duplicating and distributing creative works, the first of which was the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Since the popularisation of the internet in the 1990s it has become possible to share information on a large scale without significant cost. Debates about enforcement, freedom, equality and the capacity to benefit from IP rights have intensified. Critiques of traditional IP regimes have been taken up in popular discourses of free access to information. These critiques have also been influenced by the politics of anti-globalisation – e.g. the No Logo movement against powerful multinational companies.

WIPO: Intellectual Property on the Internet: A Survey of Issues

The International Intellectual Property Institute: Museums and the Digital Future (Adobe PDF format)