Strict Laws and Expert Lawyers Protect Intellectual Property Rights

If you created it, it belongs to you… except when you don’t.

Both national and international laws control who owns the “intellectual property,” the products of your creative genius. Copyright laws govern written works, narratives in films and television broadcasts, and most photographic and cinematographic images and icons. Trademarks, service marks, and the lower case “r” sign protect the corporation’s logos and advertising art; in some cases, they even protect the font in the corporation’s advertising. Patents protect inventions.

However, in the Internet age, everything seems to be at stake and violations of intellectual property rights happen a million times a minute. The internet has become the “Wild West” of intellectual property rights – go ahead and claim your own idea, but watch as all the black hats in the known world claim it as their own. Blogs are constantly attacked for their good ideas, and “tweets” are re-tweeted without regard to the rights of the original “poet.” Every unauthorized download steals someone’s good idea; every copy of a good design appropriates someone’s precious work of art.

If you’re still in school, your teachers or professors are likely to have serious warnings and severe penalties for plagiarism, by far the most common violation of intellectual property rights. Especially at a college or university, where careers and fortunes depend on the quality of a scholar’s ideas, intellectual property theft is an extremely serious crime. In the workplace, these rights become a serious matter. Consider, as main examples, the popular queue formulas. Their brands are based on their hallmarks, and a small fortress of proprietary paper and flavor safeguards protects those soda recipes. In a more peculiar example, Harry Caray, the longtime voice of the Chicago Cubs, took steps to shield his trademark exclamation “Holy Cow!” as his intellectual property, preventing other sportscasters from imitating him without crediting him. Very technically, garage bands should pay for the rights to cover songs in the same way that theater producers should pay for the rights to make new productions of old works.

Industrial espionage takes intellectual property issues to the extreme extreme. If the Acme Anvil Company is developing a new carbon composite anvil that’s sure to fall on the roadrunner every time, Universal Anvil Works certainly wants to see what their chemistries and designs look like, of course, so Universal can copy and improve on Acme’s product. . . Even the first wild idea for the new anvil is Acme intellectual property, and using it without paying is theft. However, in a competitive market, free enterprise and war have much in common.

So what does a lawyer do when they specialize in intellectual property? The practice is to protect original works and make sure people pay for “fair use” of a creator’s original inventions. Yes, you can photocopy the entire biochemistry textbook… after you pay the copyright holder for the right to copy it. If the publisher catches you stealing copies of your biochemical masterpiece, he can collect compensatory and punitive damages, because everything about that book, down to the color of the ink and the photo on page 237, belongs to that publisher. The publisher’s lawyer secured the copyright, and now the lawyer is going after the bootlegger with the full force of the law on the publisher’s side.

If you are a creative artist of any kind, learn how to protect your intellectual property. If you’re a law student, consider specializing in intellectual property rights, because it promises to remain one of the hottest areas throughout the 21st century.