what entity owns intellectual property rights?

Intellectual Property (IP) rights are an extremely important aspect of owning and creating any type of creative material. IP rights are often misunderstood, but knowing who owns them is important for anyone that creates or works with any kind of creative property. So, what entity owns intellectual property rights? Let's try to answer this question loosely.

No single entity "own" IP rights outright, as they can be owned by a variety of parties such as authors and inventors, corporations, governments, and more. Authors and inventors are the most frequent owners of IP rights. Upon creating a copyrightable work or designing an invention, authors/inventors automatically own the exclusive right to exploit that work/invention through various forms such as distributing their creation, making copies, performing their creation publicly, etc. The author/inventor has the exclusive right to license others the right to use their work/invention by assigning them with a patent or copyright license respectively.

Corporations may also own IP rights in certain situations through assignments from authors or inventors. This may be done through employment agreements where the employee assigns ownership of certain works/inventions over to their employer upon hiring or through direct transfer in exchange for payment or other form of remuneration. These types of transfers must be written down for them to take effect legally.

As far as governments are concerned, in certain countries public authorities may hold statutory monopoly over some types of industrial property (such as patents) and specific copyrights (usually those around translations of national laws into foreign languages). Governments also have the authority to place inventorship attribution and set rules around what qualifies something as an invention in order to protect collective interests such as public health care and safety while granting patents on noteworthy discoveries by private individuals within these fields as well as within limited settings (such as universities).

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