Providing intellectual property rights to individuals to create new products, services, or works of art acts as an incentive to the creator while delivering a variety of products and services to the public. IP law encompasses a number of distinct legal fields including copyrights, trademarks, unfair competition, patent law, trade secrets, and computer law.
Copyrights generally deal with a fixed expression of an idea, such as a poem, picture, or story.
Trademarks are limited by geographic area and by type of goods or services they represent. If the use of a trademark is disputed by two parties, the rule of thumb is whether the duplication is likely to confuse the public. Machines, designs, and processes can all be patented. However, equations that are natural phenomenon can not be patented.