The Internet and Intellectual Property Laws Essay -- Internet Online

The Internet and Intellectual Property Laws With the emergence and growth of the internet, intellectual property laws are much harder to enforce and many people are saying that they are outdated and obsolete. Intellectual property allows you to own your ideas, thoughts, and creativity as you would own a piece of tangible property. The human mind is a creative tool that comes up with ideas, designs, schemes, and inspirations of all kinds. Intellectual property views these ideas as being property. The ideas must also have commercial value and be a tradable commodity otherwise there would be no point to protect it. Intellectual property is basically the ownership of ideas. If one were to write a novel, for which the idea was conceived in there mind, they could copyright that novel so that no other person could steal that idea and write another novel on it. Copyright is a type of intellectual property. The main types of intellectual property are patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and copyrights. There are many issues arising abou t copyright and intellectual property due to the technological advances in the past ten years or so. A patent is a way to protect your invention. A patent makes sure that no other person can make, sell, offer for sale, or import your invention for a certain amount of time, in Canada it is 20 years. Since you have put a lot of time and effort into creating and producing your product, a patent prohibits others from copying your creation so all of your time doesn’t go to waste. This allows you to properly market your creation and prevent competition in the early stages of your commercialization effort. Patentable material includes any â€Å"new and useful art, process, machine, manufacture or composition of ... .../31intell.htm> Intellectual Property. No date. Government of UK. 26 Jan. 2003 > Intellectual Property in Health Research. No Date. HRC 2 Feb. 2003 Levy, Steven. â€Å"Issues of Intellectual Property & Copyright for Educators†. Newsweek. 27 Feb. 1995. 26 Jan. 2003 McCullagh, Dean. â€Å"Judge: Kazaa can be Sued in US†. 10 Jan. 2003. 1 Feb. 2003 Overbye, Morten. â€Å"Teen Cleared in Landmark DVD Case.† 7 Jan. 2002. CNN. 26 Jan. 2003 FootNotes 1Baumer and Poindexter (pg42) 2http://www.bountyquest.com/patent/whatisip.htm 3http://news.com.com/2100-1023-980274.html?tag=lh 4http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/01/07/dvd.johansen/