Written by Muqi Wulan
Designing is an activity where innovative ideas are most probably created. However if the creator’s idea is stolen unfortunately while sharing, it would be an unpleasant situation. Therefore these kinds of ideas or creations can be protected as Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). IPRs are “the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds. They usually give the creator an exclusive right over the use of his/her creation for a certain period of time” (WTO 2011). In the UK there are six basic categories of IPRs: patents, copyright, registered designs, design right, trade marks and confidential information (Irish 2005: 2). The rights often overlap. A product might be protected by all six rights at some stage in its design, manufacture and marketing. Table 1 depicts the protection of different IPRs available to engineering products or materials.
Table 1 – Protection scopes of IPRs (Irish 2005: 3)
Patents
A patent protects an new invention, and covers how things work, what they do, how they do it, what they are made of and how they are made. It gives the owner the right to prevent others from making, using, importing or selling the invention without permission. A patent is granted for an invention, which must be new, and not obvious to someone with knowledge and experience in the subject. The invention is also capable of industrial applications (Intellectual Property Office 2011a). The following things are excluded from patent protection (Irish 2005: 64):
– a discovery, scientific theory or mathematical method,
– aesthetic creations,
– mental concepts,
– presentation of information,
– computer programs,
– and immoral inventions.
If an invention is promising to meet the above requirements, the first step in getting a patent is to prepare a specification which describes the invention, and files it at the UK patent office. After 18 months from the priority data, a patent application is published by the patent office as a document called the A-specification. Figure 1 is the cover page of the A-specification for UK patent application 2239940. If the application is granted with a patent by examination, a second publication will take place using a reference letter B with the same number. Published UK patent specifications are available in the British Library:
– in a weekly publication – The Patents & Designs Journal,
– or by the access from http://www.bl.uk/.
Figure 1 – The sample of a UK patent application 2239940
Registered design
Registered design is a legal right which protects the overall visual appearance of a product or a part of a product in the country or countries you register it. This means that protection is given to the way a product looks. For the purposes of registration, a design is legally defined as being “the appearance of the whole or part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture or materials of the product or ornamentation”. For its registration to be valid, the design must have novelty and individual character (Intellectual Property Office 2011b). Figure 2 illustrates a registration owned by Rutland Gilts Limited who applied to protect a telephone connector. Its registration number is 2079859.
Figure 2 – Registered design for a telephone connector 2079859 (Irish 2005: 48)
Design right
Design right gives you automatic protection for the internal or external shape or configuration of an original design. However it does not give you protection for any of the 2-dimensional aspects, for example patterns. You can protect 2-dimensional designs using copyright or registered design. Design right lasts either 10 years after the first marketing of products that use the design, or 15 years after preparing non-marketing design. In the first 5 years you can stop anyone from copying the design. For the rest of the time the design is subject to a license of right. Design right will only give the protection in the UK (Intellectual Property Office 2011c).
Copyright
Copyright protects the expression of ideas but not the idea itself. It applies widely in the engineering field, covering reports, specifications, engineering drawings and computer software. For a work to gain copyright protection, it has to be original and should be expressed in a fixed material form, for example, in writing. Protection is automatic. No action is needed to register the copyright in the work before it is protected (JISC Legal Information 2008). The legal right lasts for the life of the author/draughtsperson/software engineer plus 70 years.
Trademarks
The aim of trade marks is to generate repeat business by the use of a memorable name or symbol. To avoid confusion, a trade mark should be easy to remember and distinguish your products or services from the ones of competitors. Effective trade marks do not describe the products or services. Figure 3 shows the good examples of trade marks. The registration can be renewed indefinitely by payment fees at intervals of 10years (Irish 2005: 115).
Figure 3 – Trade Marks by Rolls Royce Group plc and Dyson Appliances Ltd
Confidential information
Confidential information is the information which is not available, or not easily available, from another source. This kind of information is not property, but you can control access to it. If valuable information is to be disclosed to a third party, the best practice is for the recipient to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in advance, agreeing not to disclose or misuse it. NDAs are also known as confidentiality agreements and confidentiality-disclosure agreements (CDA) (Intellectual Property Office 2011d) (Intellectual Property Office 2011e). For example, employees have an implied obligation to protect confidential information belonging to their employer (Irish 2005:114). Confidential information is also known as “know-how” and trade secrets.
Summary
This section gives an overview on the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). IPRs consist of six types: patents, registered design, design right, copyright, trademarks and confidential information. They can provide broad legal protections on creative ideas, products or services.
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Selected References
Irish, V. (2005) Intellectual property rights for engineers. 2nd edn. London: The Institution of Electrical Engineers
Intellectual Property Office (2011a) What is a patent? [online] available from <http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/patent/p-about/p-whatis.htm> [27July 2011]
Intellectual Property Office (2011b) What is a registered design? [online] available from <http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/design/d-about/d-whatis.htm> [27July 2011]
Intellectual Property Office (2011c) Design right [online] available from <http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/design/d-about/d-designright.htm> [27July 2011]
Intellectual Property Office (2011d) Confidentiality [online] available from <http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/patent/p-applying/p-apply/p-cda.htm> [27July 2011]
Intellectual Property Office (2011e) Confidentiality [online] available from <http://www.ipo.gov.uk/nda.pdf > [27 July 2011]
JISC Legal Information (2008) Intellectual Property Rights – Overview [online] available from < http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/LegalAreas/CopyrightIPR/IPROverview.aspx> [27July 2011]
WTO (2011) What are intellectual property rights? [online] available from <http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel1_e.htm> [27 July 2011]