what do intellectual property rights aim to do
Intellectual property The main purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the creation of a large variety of intellectual goods. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to the information and intellectual goods they create – usually for a limited period of time. This gives economic incentive for their creation, because it allows people to profit from the information and intellectual goods they create.[5] These economic incentives are expected to stimulate innovation and contribute to the technological progress of countries, which depends on the extent of protection granted to innovators.[6]
Public domain The public domain consists of all the creative works to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired,[1] been forfeited,[2] expressly waived, or may be inapplicable.[3] For example, the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, and most early silent films are in the public domain either by virtue of their having been created before copyright existed, or by their copyright term having expired.[1] Some works are not covered by copyright, and are therefore in the public domainâ€”among them the formulae of Newtonian physics, cooking recipes,[4] and all computer software created prior to 1974.[5] Other works are actively dedicated by their authors to the public domain (see waiver); some examples include reference implementations of cryptographic algorithms,[6][7][8] the image-processing software ImageJ,[9] created by the National Institutes of Health, and the CIA's World Factbook.[10] The term public domain is not normally applied to situations where the creator of a work retains residual rights, in which case use of the work is referred to as "under license" or "with permission".