Creativity is one of the most appreciated values in the market, so both artists who create a unique work and companies that produce original products need to protect their creations . In these cases, copyright and intellectual property come into play, mechanisms that act at a national and global level to protect original works and solve possible conflicts of interest that may arise between authors, publishers, distributors and the public that consumes them. .
What is intellectual property?
Intellectual property is a set of rights that belong to authors and other owners for the works and features they have created . All creations of the mind that are considered original are the intellectual property of the author and are protected by current legislation.
International law recognizes the intellectual property of all creations of the mind, both literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images, models or drawings. However, a difference is established between industrial property, which includes patents, trademarks, inventions and industrial models, and copyright.
What are copyrights?
Copyright refers to all rights granted to the author of an original literary or artistic work for the purpose of protecting his or her interests . An author is understood as a person who has made an original creation, which requires a minimum merit or artistic relevance.
Copyright is obtained automatically when you create a work, without any formalities involved . According to the Berne Convention, the author has two types of rights. The personal or moral rights , which are inalienable and inalienable, determine the author’s personal bond with the work and provide for the right of integrity that allows the author to oppose any modification that may harm his honor and that of his paternity, as well as the right to his recognition as an author.
On the other hand, economic or economic rights refer to the reproduction, distribution, public communication or transformation of the work, granting the author the possibility of deciding on the use of it by third parties, so that they can assign those rights. You might be interested in more articles on our site.
What is the difference between copyright and intellectual property?
Creators or companies should know that copyright does not protect the idea, but its material expression . For example, the idea of writing about intellectual property law is not protected, but the result of it: the book or the article. In fact, not only ideas but also procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts are excluded.
Intellectual property is a broader concept made up of a series of rights attributed to the author . In the Spanish legal system, industrial property is differentiated and regulated by its own laws, so that the terms intellectual property and copyright are often used interchangeably, but in Anglo-Saxon law this is not the case.
In this case, an important difference is that copyright works do not need to be registered in the corresponding offices , but are protected from their creation. On the other hand, to protect industrial property rights, it is necessary to register them with the corresponding authority.
Another important difference lies in the term of duration . The economic rights of the author, for example, extend up to 70 years after his death, while the industrial property rights for companies only last 10 years, although they can be renewed indefinitely. However, it must be taken into account that, if a brand or company does not use its creation for three consecutive years, any interested person can request its cancellation, something that could not be done with copyright.
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