THE NATURE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (IPRS) are the rights granted by statute law to the originators of what might be referred to as ‘the products of the mind’, and which give the author, or creator, a qualified monopoly over the ways in which the created work might be used or exploited.
Intellectual property is divided into four branches: patents, trademarks, designs (so-called ‘industrial property’) and copyright. There are a number of fundamental principles common to all the intellectual property rights, but this Report, emanating as it does from the print industries, is concerned only with copyright as this is the branch of intellectual property which shapes the environment of those industries.
General Principles
Although copyright legislation differs from country to country – sometimes fundamentally, sometimes merely in the detail – there are certain central principles which are universally agreed and enshrined in international treaties and national legislations:
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