COURSE MATERIALS AND

Intellectual
property rights


You have access to the materials for your online course of study up until your course end date, after which online access will no longer be available.

However, you will also have a PDF of the material which is yours to keep for the rest of your life. It has intentionally been made unprintable and these following reasons are why.

Our intellectual property is what makes our brand a valuable commodity for our current and ongoing work and our College. To ensure that we have exclusive control over the use of our creative and literary works, protection over our original offerings and prevention of unauthorised copying, we safeguard our intellectual property rights and our brand. Our College owns the exclusive right to all of our materials, and all products developed in whole or in part by Shanti Gowans and HIA. According to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author”

DEFINITION
Intellectual property is an umbrella term for a set of intangible assets that are creations of the human intellect. It is the property of the mind and refers to any exclusive knowledge and intellectual creation, including but not limited to literary works, artistic works, inventions, designs, symbols, names, images, courses, products, services, processes, ideas, codes, etc.

RATIONALE
Intellectual property is an extension of an individual, of themself and of their personality, and they have a natural, absolute and perpetual right to their property, and the ideas, of which they are the discoverer or creator. A person’s right to the property of ideas, is intrinsically the same as, and stands on identically the same grounds as their right to property in material things; there’s no distinction in principle between the two cases.

The human mind itself is the source of wealth and survival and all property at its base is intellectual property. To violate intellectual property is therefore no different to morally violating other property rights, which compromises the very processes of survival and therefore constitutes an immoral act.

A person has a natural right over the labour and products which are produced by their mind, and iIntellectual property is justifiably based on deservedness, hard work and the right to control that which the owner has created. Appropriating these products must be viewed as unjust.

Without intellectual property there would be a lack of incentive to produce new ideas. Intellectual property stimulates social progress and pushes people to further innovation. Systems of protection such as Intellectual property rights optimise social utility.

Intellectual property law exists in order to protect creators of their intellectual property and covers areas of copyright, trademark law, and patent law.