Concept of property; industrial and non-industrial property — Intellectual Property Rights I Notes

Concept of property; industrial and non-industrial property

When John Locke wrote in 1689 that “every man has a property in his own person… the labour of his body and the work of his hands are properly his”, he was talking about land and cattle. Three centuries later that same sentence is used to justify a patent on a gene and a trade mark on a soft drink. Property, it turns out, is not the thing — it is the bundle of rights the law recognises over it.

What “property” really means

Start with the everyday picture: property is a thing you own — a house, a car, a watch. The law’s picture is slightly different and more useful. Property is not the object itself but a bundle of rights the law gives a person over a resource: the right to use it, to enjoy its fruits, to exclude others, and to transfer it. Own a house and you may live in it, rent it out, keep trespassers off, and sell it. Those four rights are the ownership.

Property splits first into tangible (movable and immovable things you can touch — land, goods) and intangible (rights that have value but no physical body — a debt, shares, and intellectual property). Intellectual property is the leading example of intangible property: what you own is the invention or the brand, not any physical copy of it.

A second, exam-favourite division is industrial property versus non-industrial (literary/artistic) property. This split comes straight from the Paris Convention, 1883.

Industrial property covers creations used in trade and industry: patents (inventions), trade marks and service marks, industrial designs, geographical indications, and protection against unfair competition. Its home statute-family is the Patents Act, Trade Marks Act, Designs Act and GI Act.
Non-industrial property — usually called literary and artistic property — is copyright: books, music, films, paintings, software. It protects expression, not commerce-linked signs, and is governed by the Copyright Act, 1957.

The line is not watertight (software and industrial designs sit near the border), but for the exam the crisp point is: industrial property is commercial and mostly registered; copyright is artistic and arises automatically on creation.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689): “Every man has a property in his own person… The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”

In Simple Terms: You own what you make. Because an invention or a brand is the “work of the hands” of the mind, the law treats it as property — a bundle of rights to use it, profit from it, keep others out, and sell it.

🧩 WORKED EXAMPLE — sorting a portfolio

Facts. A company owns: (a) a factory building, (b) a patent on a machine, (c) the “Amul” trade mark, (d) the copyright in its advertising jingle.

Rule. Property = tangible/intangible; intangible IP splits into industrial (patent, mark) and non-industrial/artistic (copyright).

Apply. (a) is tangible immovable property. (b) and (c) are intangible industrial property. (d) is intangible non-industrial (artistic) property.

Conclusion. Three of the four assets are intellectual property; only the jingle sits in the copyright/artistic box, the other two in the industrial box.

flowchart TD
    P["Property (a bundle of rights)"]:::root
    P --> T["Tangible (land, goods)"]:::leaf
    P --> I["Intangible (rights with value)"]:::leaf
    I --> IND["Industrial property (patents, marks, designs, GI)"]:::leaf
    I --> ART["Non-industrial / artistic (copyright)"]:::leaf
    classDef root fill:#FFF8DC,stroke:#000,color:#000;
    classDef leaf fill:#E6F3FF,stroke:#1E3A8A,color:#000;

Case Laws

Diamond v Chakrabarty (1980) — even a living, genetically-engineered micro-organism can be “property” capable of a patent; property expands to fit new creations.
R.C. Cooper v Union of India (1970) — the Supreme Court described property as a bundle of rights, the widest concept in the Constitution’s Article 19(1)(f)/31 scheme.

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