INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

The concept of intellectual property rights refers to the exclusive privilege granted to individuals or institutions to make use or sell goods and services that embody the ideas, techniques and inventions that they have appropriated. "An intellectual property rights system thus can be defined as the interrelationship between a set of incentives and rewards designed to stimulate the creative, inventive activity of people and institutions for the achievement of specific goals and the mechanisms that regulate and permit the enforcement of the exclusive rights." The most important intellectual property rights in existence are patents and copyrights. The patent is the exclusive right to make, use or sell a particular application of a new idea. It is thus a mechanism for the disclosure of new knowledge and it encourages entrepreneurs to invest on patents that in turn covered not only industrial processes and products but is now extended to services and agriculture. Copyright is the exclusive privilege to make copies or to reproduce a particular tangible expression or information. Other intellectual property rights are certificates of invention, trade secrets, trademarks, plants' patent and plant breeding rights. The most recent type of intellectual property rights is for semi-conductor chip layouts.

‘The growing international concern over the intellectual property rights stems from four major considerations: 

a) "It is intangible and easily leaked out. Intellectual property can transcend national boundaries and legislations in a way that is not possible for real property. New technologies, particularly the cluster making up information technology, have enormously enhanced the characteristic of intellectual property. Hence the protection of IPRs on the basis of national laws and the dissemination of information which those laws are designed to protect is considered to be a matter of international concern. 

b) "Since national legislation has not kept pace with technological progress, new questions have arisen, the solution to which requires new mechanisms and regulations. These need to cover not only the legal aspects of property rights but also the economic, ethical and political aspects. 

C) "Since existing legislation is national in character, its enforcement depends upon national procedure and mechanisms. In turn, new technologies facilitate dissemination, imitation, and infringement, they also make it more difficult to identify the infringement and consequently more difficult to enforce rights. and  

d) "It is now recognized that the economic dimension of intellectual property rights has a far greater relevance than was traditionally assumed. This is perhaps the most important of the four considerations."