Last week saw the news that Twitter has threatened to sue Meta
due to an alleged violation of intellectual property rights. As
summarised in this article, Twitter has claimed that their
"trade secrets and other intellectual property" has been
willfully and unlawfully misappropriated. I can't help but
wonder what those other intellectual property rights are and, in
particular, whether they are true monopoly rights.
While the Meta / Twitter dispute will likely be decided in a US
court (if it does go as far as a courtroom), to make a broad
generalisation under UK law, there are two categories of
intellectual property rights – unregistered and
registered.
Unregistered rights are free and they do not need to be applied
for. An example of an unregistered right that you might be familiar
with is copyright. Copyright exists for a literary work when the
work was first recorded – no application process is needed.
There are other types of unregistered rights, for example,
