Concept Paper: Intellectual Property

Engaging in someone elses intellectual property can be likened to reading a book or an

article, watching a movie or a play, listening to speakers of lectures and seminars, looking at a
companys logo or even simply occupying oneself to a new smartphone technology. Might it be
conscious or not, this experience is quite familiar for everyone but despite this rather established
familiarity, the term remains to require some elaboration for simple experience might not directly
imply a thorough comprehension of the idea at stake.
Philips and Firth offers two definitions of intellectual property, one being the colloquial
definition and the other as the legal definition (3). According to them, colloquial intellectual
property could be thought of as anything that is produced from the exercise of the human
brain, might it be ideas, inventions, poems, designs, etc. (3). The other legal definition is
then noted to be specifically concentrating on the rights that are conferred upon such
produce[s] of the mind (Philips and Firth, 3). This non-legal definition can be opined to result
from a rather crude isolation of the term intellect from the parent term. Intellect is defined as a
faculty and deriving from this commonsensical analogy, it is not strange that the colloquial
definition proposed by Philips and Firth would arise (Soanes and Stevenson).
A crucial factor to properly conceptualize what intellectual property is involves placing
the term property to some legal definition. Property, in the conventional use, refers to a thing
or things belonging to someone (Soanes and Stevenson). However, in the legal sense of the
term, emphasis is placed on the type of right to possess, control or own the item in question
rather than on the item itself (Walston-Dunham 370). By using the legal sense of the term
property, Phillips and Firths definition is justified and intellectual property can be identified in
the simplest sense as ones right to his/her intellectual produces.
Intellectual property can best benefit the creator if he/she is conferred exclusive "right to
the exploitation of his/her work which is then made possible by the protection advanced by the
intellectual property law (Philips and Firth 5; Colston 1). Protection of intellectual property
also has a commonsensical side which is exemplified in what Philips and Firth identify as the
practical way of applying such protection (10). They discuss the practical approach in
intellectual property protection in two evidently logical ways. The first method succeeds in
denying unwanted outsider access accomplished through the creators choice of literally not