intellectual property

First use appears c. 1769.

intellectual property (usually uncountable, plural intellectual properties)

1. (copyright law, uncountable) A kind of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect, such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks.

   Synonym: (initialism) IP

   • 2013 June 8, “Obama goes troll-hunting”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8839, page 55:

     According to this saga of intellectual-property misanthropy, these creatures [patent trolls] roam the business world, buying up patents and then using them to demand extravagant payouts from companies they accuse of infringing them. Often, their victims pay up rather than face the costs of a legal battle.

   • 2013 June 22, “T time”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8841, page 68:

     The ability to shift profits to low-tax countries by locating intellectual property in them, which is then licensed to related businesses in high-tax countries, is often assumed to be the preserve of high-tech companies. […] current tax rules make it easy for all sorts of firms to generate […] “stateless income”: profit subject to tax in a jurisdiction that is neither the location of the factors of production that generate the income nor where the parent firm is domiciled.

2. (copyright law, countable) Any individual work that is protected under intellectual property law.
   • One area of current change concerns intellectual properties and intellectual property rights.

     "Intellectual Property Rights in Agriculture"

   • For technology companies, a well-constructed system for managing intellectual properties is fundamental to being able to extract full value from the properties

     "Profiting from Intellectual Capital: Extracting Value from Innovation" By Patrick H. Sullivan

• intellectual property on Wikipedia.Wikipedia