Intellectual Property Rights

The exclusive rights that are granted by intellectual property laws are generally restrictive in nature, and therefore only grant the holder of Intellectual Property Rights the ability to prevent third parties from infringing on their monopoly. As an example, the owner of a registered trademark can exclude all others from using that mark in relation to those products or services. Some marks, which are recognized as “famous” or “well known”, are said to have developed sufficient goodwill and reputation to be protected across unrelated classes of products and services.

Intellectual property can be divided into four categories. These are Trademarks, Patents, Designs and Copyright. Intellectual property laws are designed to protect these different categories, although in some cases there is a degree of overlap. Briefly, a trademark is a distinctive logo, brand name or slogan that is used to distinguish the services or products of different businesses. A patent, when granted, gives the patent holder the exclusive right to exploit his technical invention commercially to the exclusion of others. An industrial design right protects the form of appearance, style or design of an industrial object, for example cameras, telephones or electric kettles. A copyright gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to control reproduction or adaptation of his copyrighted works, for example books, movies, music, paintings, photographs, and software for a certain period of time. It is therefore important to note that the term "intellectual property" denotes the specific legal rights, which authors, inventors and other IP holders may hold and exercise, and not the intellectual work itself. In all cases it is up to the owner of those rights to prevent others from infringing on their monopoly.

Intellectual Property Rights are legally treated as property. As such they may be disposed of by the owner in any way he or she chooses. They may be sold, licensed out, mortgaged, leased or even just given away. These exclusive rights can generally be divided into two categories, those that prevent people from the copying or reproduction of an article, and those that grant the owner the right to prevent others from doing something. Copyright would prevent someone from copying a book or a speech, whereas a trademark prevents someone from using the same logo or slogan. With the exception of copyright, where only cinematographic films need to be registered, all intellectual property need to be registered to be sufficiently enforceable. In South Africa this is done at the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office in Pretoria. This can sometimes be done by the owner of that property himself but usually must be carried out by either a patent attorney or a trademark attorney. For written works it is sufficient to include the words “copyright” together with a name of the author and the year at the foot of the work.