domains: intellectual proprietary rights

The Intellectual Proprietary Right is an individual set of laws and international treaties, ruling the proprietary right of the products of intellectual work.

With the intellectual proprietary right, the government grants certain rights to the inventor or maker of a product, invention, brand name, piece of music or literature. Only the party possessing the intellectual proprietary right, has the right for example to produce the product, record the piece of music or publish and multiply the book.

It is also said that an intellectual proprietary right gives the maker a (temporary) monopoly regarding the use of the works concerned, although this is not correct. The right may only grant an exclusive right. Whether this also leads to a monopoly, is a question of an economic nature. When there are so-called substitutes (an economic notion), an exclusive right does not lead to a monopoly.

We distinguish the following domains with various sorts of intellectual property:

• The copyright: the exclusive right of an author to publish or multiply his works of literature, science or art. The copyright also includes portrait right and image right.

• The database right: the protection of the intellectual property of collections of works (either protected by copyright or not). The right does not apply to the works included in the database, but to the collection itself.

• The patent right: the right of a patent holder to prevent others from commercial exploitation of his invention, in exchange for the publication of the invention.

• The business secret: the right of companies as regards secrecy of confidential information which is valuable from the standpoint of the competition.

• The brand name right: the exclusive right to use a specific trade name (such as a product name or a logo).

• The trade mark law: the exclusive right to use a trade name or company name.

• The domain name right: the right to an internet domain name. This right is still controversial since any legal basis is missing. The right could form part of the trade name or brand name right. Question is, if a specific law is required.

• The drawing and model right: the exclusive right to provide products with a specific drawing (image) and to produce products according to a specific model.

• The semi-conductor right: this right can be found in the law regarding the protection of original topographies of semi-conductor products dated 1987. The right will protect the design of chips, microprocessors and other semi-conductors.

• The related rights: the intellectual proprietary rights which artists have to their performances of work (by other parties). For example, not everyone has the right to perform an opera exactly in the same way as someone else does, and a singer does not have the right to imitate a certain singer.

• The breeder’s right: this right applies to breeding material of any ‘variety’ belonging to the world of plants. This right does not apply to animal races.

It is obvious that globalisation has increased the importance of the international protection of intellectual rights.

Since the nationalistically inspired protectionism no longer persists in the European Union or elsewhere, companies are feverishly searching for one or other way to protect their know-how.

On the international level, the TRIPS treaty, the WIPO agreements and various other initiatives of the European Union have certainly contributed to the strengthening or the enforcement and hence the value of any patrimonial rights related to these intellectual rights. 

In addition to the globalisation of the world, a complex information society has arisen in which the possession of data has become a crucial factor for success. The explosive growth of the internet will only strengthen this evolution. Computer programmes and well structured and updated data collections, such as databases which are often qualified as multimedia products, are the pre-eminent instruments to manage this information. The judicial framework to protect these instruments is situated within the domain of intellectual rights and in particular copyrights, patent rights, laws regarding databases …

Any company or individual with questions about the protection of intellectual proprietary rights of whatever nature, as described above, will be helped in our office with the required and specialised expertise.