Intellectual Property Law

Intellectual Property Law has been identified to grow at a rapid pace due to (a) the advent of the internet which constitutes the very heart of the digital revolution, (b) unprecedented advances in Science and Technology, (c) the emergence of intellectual assets, as information, knowledge and innovation, and (d) the internationalization of commerce which is further aided by the establishment of multi-lateral trade bodies as World Trade Organization.

All the nations including Australia have been manipulating Intellectual Property as a means to capture the value of the creativity of its people which is the basis for innovation and to convert such innovations into measurable economic assets. In other words, it is a means by which individuals, companies, research and educational institutions and even the State use to monetise inventions.

About intellectual Property Law

Intellectual Property encompasses the property of someone's intellectual possession and includes but not restricted to proprietary knowledge in business. It is a group of 'legislative common law rights affording  protection to creative and intellectual effort and includes among other things laws on copyright, design, patent, circuit layouts , plant varieties, information confidential and sensitive in nature, trade marks and extends its scope both to industrial and non-industrial innovations and inventions.

Australia's Patent Law is governed by the Patents Act, 1990 and the Trade Marks Act, 1995. These laws have been undergoing considerable changes to respond to dynamic needs and in addition a New Design Act is on the anvil to replace the age old Design Act 1906.

Different types of Intellectual Property Law

There are broadly four known types of Intellectual property Law, viz, (I) Copyright, (ii) Patents, (iii) Trademarks and (iv) Trade Secrets.

Copyrights include the expression of ideas, as, for example, are found in Music, Writing and or Pictures. The explosion in technology has made it cheaper and easier for people to copy information through printing, photo-copying and or scanning, photographing and sound recordings which have undermined the ability of the State to protect the intellectual property of someone else.

Similarly, whereas many physical objects can be used by only one person at a time, (say, clothing can be used only in an individual capacity for wearing), in the intellectual property, the ideas can be copied 'n' number of times, yet, the person who originally owns alone has the rights to the full use of it.

Within the types of Intellectual Property law, a latest idea that has crept into it is biological information. This has led the businesses to compete with one another to take out patents on innumerable genetic codes. For example, patents have been granted covering all transgenic forms of an entire species, say, Soya beans or cottons.

Example of Intellectual Law

A typical example could be found in the digital technology advancement and the implication it has on the violation of the owners of the Copyright with specific reference to music downloads. An MP3 is a file 'that stores a song in a compressed format. It comes from MPEG3 audio layer. MPEG is an acronym for Moving Picture Exports Group which is credited with the development of this technology. The digital technology poses enormous challenges to copyright owners due to its capability to enable the pirates to reproduced and distribute copies of copyrighted works at nil costs to the pirates. As the technology advances, so the law also and thus goes the arguments.

In Australia, the Digital Agenda Amendments to the Copyright Act, which came into effect in 2001, made changes to the provisions relating to the concept of authorization of infringement of the copyright in sound recordings. The Copyright Act s101 states that infringement occurs when any act is either done or authorized which is not comprised in the copyright’.

In a different case pertaining to this subject, Morehouse involved an action against a university library which provided photocopying facilities. The issue that arose for legal consideration was ' whether the provision of these facilities in a lending library amounted to authorizing the illegal photocopying of books'. In this case, Justice Gibbs of Australian Supreme court delivered a judgment to the effect that it amounts to infringing the copyright and the same case law was applied to Music sharing and it was held that in the case of P2P sharing,’ making software available that is likely to be used for the purpose of committing an infringement, without taking reasonable steps to limit its use to legitimate purpose, would be to authorize this infringement'.

The Intellectual Property regimes is likely to gain more and more currency along with the technological advancements due to some of the simple arguments, as, that people are entitled to the results of their labor which makes them deserve property rights and a private property is a means for personal autonomy and hence rights are needed to promote the creation of new ideas. The arguments for preservation of individual rights would only grow over a period of time (and) it is a challenge for the Laws of any country to respond to them and Australia is no exception to this.