Thursday, September 27, 2012

Patent Vs Copyrights

While writing previous post I used many sites and of course, I have given credit to them still, I pondered upon the thought that what if I had used the material without citing them. This happens many a times in our Indian cinema and we better know it as Plagiarism. 

More recently Apple sued Samsung in US for adopting similar physical attributes and hardware.
Click for more

What can a person do when his material/work is used by other without his prior permission.

On this context were built two important concepts and laws on Intellectual Property Rights and is governed by WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) that grants the patents:

1. Patents
2. Copyrights
3. Trademarks (will discuss it later)

Lets understand it in simple terms. While patents are usually on material, process and object the copyrights are associated with publications, books, music etc. Let’s delve ourselves deep into the world of copyrights and Patents

Patent 
A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the Patent and Trademark Office. The term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed.

Copyright


Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of "original works of authorship" including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished.


The common view on copyright versus patenting is that copyright protects the expression of an idea, while a patent protects the idea itself.

Thus a same story told by different people in different expression or say using same idea but different dialogues would not infringe copyright, but an invention like Android platform can’t be duplicated as its patented. Similarly applications on android and apple are copyrighted not patented as you can have two different calculators showing same answer using same coding but as a whole the expression is different.



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