What is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.

Intellectual Property is divided into two categories: Industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and Copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs.

With the Internet birth a problematic around the intellectual property, now is possible to pass music, films or any type to us of documents by Internet, besides all the pages and programs that exist to be able to download them directly. This has taken that it is not clear that is the author of all these documents, or that this one, according to some, does not receive sufficient compensation by his work.

In theory the easiest option would be to prohibit the free downloadings by Internet, to close the pages Web that violate the right of intellectual property. Of this form we avoided that people profit from the other people's work.
But we made this decision, since it has happened in Spain, we will be committing some errors, the most important it is than we violated a fundamental right: The freedom of expression. But in addition it is that the majority of the pages Web uses images, videos, etc. that have author right, therefore if those pages were closed all we could be speaking of almost the totality of the Internet content.

But he is not right either that we used freely, the work of others, , right is that we have its authorization, currently artists and creators are realizing that the future is in internet, the efforts do not have to go to sell many CD but rather to obtain that Internet music arrives at everybody. If we want to make the things well we do not have because to resort to download archives to us illegally. Every time more pages exist than they provide materials to us of totally legal way For example:
in the Web page "http://www.pro-music.org/ " you can find connections to hundreds of legal pages of music worldwide, classified by countries.

Collected data of national

statistics

institute:

-

In 2006, in Spain 135 million films were downloaded illegally.

- 50% of the Spanish people between 16 and 24 years go to networks P2P to download all type of archives: films, series, computer science music, programs…

If you want more information about the intellectual property you can read:
- Understanding Copyright and Related Rights
- Understanding Industrial Property
- WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook (a comprehensive introduction to the policy, law and use of IP)