What exactly is intellectual property?
Intellectual property—even though we have one name for it—includes a lot of different things that are sort of stuck together. It’s patents. It’s also copyrights, which are particularly important for most software. It also includes trademarks, like the name of your project can sometimes be trademarked. And, there are trade secrets which you may sometimes get involved with through your employer. Even open source companies can have trade secrets. There are also some aspects of contract law—agreements that you make. The most important of those are software licenses that you release your software under. And then there’s even a little bit with when your project grows up and you want to create a foundation around it. How do you do that? In all these ways, the law shapes what you can do with your project and how you interact with it, and so it takes you through the lifecycle of a project and gives an overview of those areas. Patents are a way of protecting not just a particular piece of code b
