What is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property is defined as the ownership of ideas or other intangible assets. This is in contrast to such things as computers, the building your business operates out of, intellectual property is a group of concepts and ideas.

In the United States, there are several ways to protect intellectual property: through the use of patents, copyrights or trademarks. A patent is only applicable to a specific product design, a copyright to a written document, and a trademark to a name, symbol or phrase. However, each of these methods has limitations and so it’s best to use several to secure your intellectual property.

In most instances, one way to add additional protection for ideas and concepts is through confidentiality agreements and trade secret laws, which offer contractual means of handling any disclosure or misuse of an idea.

Copyright protects a variety of works, including digital, pictorial, graphic, sound recordings, but not concepts and ideas. It protects how you express an idea, but not the actual idea.

On the other hand, a patent, once granted will give you a 20-year monopoly on the sale, use, production and import of an invention into the United States. There are precise requirements for a patent, but they stipulate that your work has to be novel (not known or used by others in the United States), non-obvious, and useful.

Finally, trademarks are similar to brand names. They are any word(s) or symbol(s) that identify and distinguish a product from others in the marketplace. The ® registration symbol may only be used next to a word after you have had it registered by the PTO.

When you’re looking to keep your intellectual property safe, it is essential that you understand not only how copyright, patents and trademark works, but also use every method available to you.

BLMP allows brands to track branded products from creation to ownership and deployment to our decentralized virtual goods marketplace.