Intellectual property, very generally, relates to the output, which result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Traditionally intellectual property is divided into two branches:
1) Industrial Property
a)
b)
c)
d) Unfair competition (trade secrets)
e) Geographical indications (indications of source and appellations of origin)
2) Copyright
The protection of intellectual property is guaranteed through a variety of laws, which grant the creators of intellectual goods, and services certain time-limited rights to control the use made of their products. Those rights apply to the intellectual creation as such, and not to the physical object in which the work may be embodied.
TEXTBLOCK 1/1 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611725/100438659434
This document, intended as a reliable electronic reference tool, provides a timeline for three types of developments and milestones: (1) advances in long distance person-to-person communication; (2) advances in storage, replication, cataloguing, finding, and retrieval of data; and (3) standardization of concepts and tools for long distance interaction.
The advancements may have a technical (hardware), conceptual (software), or an organizational aspect, or represent an important milestone in the history of a given invention, and are annotated as such in the timeline.
The period covered ranges from 30000 BC up to now.
http://www.ciolek.com/PAPERS/milestones.html