What is intellectual property law?

Virtually everybody knows something about property. If you own a home, you know something about real property. And you probably know something about personal property. That's the things you probably have in your house. These are tangible things. That's how we think of property in most cases, but what about intangible property? What about the things that are invisible that we want to consider property? We call those things intellectual property, and there's a body of law that helps define what intellectual property is that we call intellectual property law.

So intellectual property law is broken down into five major groups. There's patent law, which most people have heard of. Patents protect useful, utilitarian devices. They need to be novel, things that have not been done before. Patents would have been used to protect printing technologies in the industrial revolution. They would've been used to protect the cotton gin, for separating cotton from seeds. And now, they're used to protect computer software, applications, pharmaceuticals, consumer products.

Trademarks, on the other hand, this is an area of intellectual property law that protects the brand name of things. So, it's what you call the product. It's what you call your company. It's the slogan that you use for your company. It's the design of the logo that you use. In some cases, it's the colors that you use. This is covered under intellectual property law subcategory called trademark law. Copyright law covers original works of authorship that have become fixed in tangible form.

So, a book, a poem a painting, video, photography, computer code. These are all things that are original works of authorship that have become fixed in tangible form. So we covered those under the, the subheading of copyright law. There's an area of intellectual property law called trade secret law. Trade secret is a body of law that protects anything that has value and has been kept secret. We've probably heard of the secret formula to Coke. Big companies have secret formulas for weed killers and pesticides.

Trade secret might cover the secret formula to the Colonel Sanders secret recipe for crispy chicken. That's trade secret law. And finally, rights of publicity is a rather new area of intellectual property law that covers the right somebody has in their name, their likeness, their persona, and even their voice. So, these are what we call intellectual property law.