Intellectual Property Rights

Property is something someone owns. Ownership is a powerful feeling and a motivator. Ever since humans stopped being nomadic and settled and started civilization process, the idea of property has played a dominant role in making and shaping the course of human society. In some sense human history is nothing but the story of making property ,owning, protecting and transferring it to posterity and fights associated with it. What can be considered as property has changed during the course of human history:land, gold, mines, money and many more. Standing of an individual , family or group was proportional to its property holdings: Kingdoms by territory they covered; landlords by land they possed and so on. Until very recently Fortune 500 list was filled with sultans and sheiks of petrorich middle east.Now are the days of intellectual property: an idea built into a product or process. An intellecutal property could be a design, algorithm (as in case of Google) or formula ( as in case of CoCo-Cola) or chemical formula as in case of pharmaceutical firms.Identifying intellectual properties and awarding its ownership to real owners and protecting it is a challenge in contemporary connected world.