 Hello, this is Wei Wenchao. Welcome to Intellectual Property Part A. In this part, we will look at how IP law or intellectual property law attempts to balance individual versus societal purposes. And we'll also have a very high level view of how Canadian IP law is structured and explain what we mean by ownership of intellectual property or IP. When you have an idea and you act on that idea, that idea can become a number of different things. It can become music. It can become an app or a piece of software that you design. It can be a book or an article that you write. It can be the name of a company or a logo for a company. It could be the design of an object such as the original iPod design. Or it could be a brand new innovative invention. All of those things would be called expressions of your ideas or products of your mind. So you've taken your idea and you've expressed it in tangible ways. So those expressions of ideas or products of the mind are regulated by intellectual property law. What intellectual property law is, is balance two different interests. The, the quote that illustrates this balancing the best is, is by a writer, American writer named Stuart Brand. He said that information wants to be free. It also wants to be expensive. So what intellectual property law does, it strikes a balance between providing individual benefits and societal benefits arising from these, these expressions of ideas. In terms of individual benefits, it provides limited legal ownership rights to allow the creators or owners to profit from their creations. So these limited legal ownership rights are, are given in the form of copyright, patents, trademark, and industrial design. There are, there are others, but those are just, those are examples. The societal benefits that intellectual property law is also concerned with is to allow others, others being the people other than the creators and the owners to build on past creations to further benefit society. Sir Isaac Newton said, if I have seen further, is by standing on the shoulder of giants. So what he meant was that many of his achievements were based on the, the achievements of people who came before him. This balancing by intellectual property law of individual interests and societal interests is expressed in, in the Supreme Court of Canada decision of Taberge and Gallery Da. In this case, the copyright owner was, was a well-known Canadian artist. He had produced a poster of one of his, one of his paintings and a gallery who purchased the poster transferred that poster and converted it into a canvas, into a canvas painting for the purposes of, of resale. So the painting, so the painter sued the gallery for, for copyright infringement. The court found that there was no infringement and, and they, they stated that the, that the Copyright Act in Canada is a balance between promoting the public interest in the encouragement and dissemination of works of the arts and intellect and obtaining a just reward for, for the creator. So the, the Supreme Court of Canada specifically stated copyright law is not just about protecting the rights of copyright holders, but it's also about promoting the, the public interest. The, the court also went on to say that excessive control of, of copyright holders can unduly limit the ability of the public domain to, to, to use that intellectual property to further the long-term interests of, of society. The statutes that govern Canadian IP law come from the federal parliament. The federal parliament has jurisdiction under the Constitution Act 1867, section 91. The specific federal statutes on IP are the Patent Act, Copyright Act, Trademark Act, and Industrial Design Act. We'll look at the first three in this module. So all of these statutes are administered by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, or CIPO. Let's examine the concept of the ownership of IP. With tangible property, ownership usually means having the right to exclusive possession, meaning that if you are the owner, you have the right to possess it to the exclusion of all others. With IP, it's a little bit different because IP is intangible. If you are the owner of IP, it gives you a bundle of exclusive legal rights to use that IP, meaning that you can use that IP for yourself to the exclusion of other people. The three major types of IP that we will examine in this course are Copyright, Trademark, and Patent. There are other types of IP which we will not examine. Those are Industrial Design, Trade Secrets or Confidential Information, Integrated Circuit Topography, and Plant Breeders' Rights.