What is Intellectual Property?
Intellectual property (IP) is the unique and un-obvious product of human intellect that has at least some
marketplace value. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), intellectual
property is divided into two categories: 1) Industrial Property: including inventions (patents),
trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and 2) Copyright (Library/Artistic
Property): including literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works,
text, procedures, custom data arrangements, working diagrams, proprietary software, discoveries
appropriate to the artist mind in the midst of performance or products and procedures that facilitate
performance and images on a World Wide Web (WWW) site, architectural designs, scientific
publications, and artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, as well as
performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and
broadcasters in their radio and television programs and any procedure, plan, layout or scheme that was
the result of discovery by the artist through performance.
In the case of musical instruments: any arrangement by the artist of the musical instrument as regards
tuning schemes, mechanical schemes, electro-mechanical assist mechanisms that are configurable by
the artists decisions. This also applies to tuning temperaments or any electronic, mechanical or
electro-mechanical systems that can be adjusted to custom configurations. These types of systems
may have hundreds of permutations and outcomes entirely dependant on the artists choices and
become intellectual properties when the outcomes are unique.