IXD302 – Week Eleven: Intellectual Property

During this week’s class, Daniel talked us through intellectual property, including what it actually is, how it can be useful to us as designers, and how we can use it to our advantage to gain access to other designer’s work.

What is Intellectual Property?

  • Drawing a picture
  • Naming a product
  • Designing a WordPress theme
  • Writing a song

If something is your intellectual property, you have the exclusive right to use, alter and profit from it. You also have the right to license your work to others at your discretion.

If you are an employee, the designs you create as part of your job are automatically your employer’s intellectual property. This is known as a work for hire arrangement.

Daniel then talked us through trade-marking and copyright, and what each of these means and consists of. I found this useful, as I had never really looked into what each of these things meant, and how they actually worked. It was just always something I had known was there, but never really understood.

Copyright is an automatic right and arises whenever an individual or company creates a work. To qualify, a work should be regarded as original, and exhibit a degree of labour, skill or judgement. These can be for items such as literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, typographical, sound recording, film and software.

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