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The idea of intellectual property is to give exclusive rights and control to those that create their work, so that they have a reason to put in the initial effort and money to create it. There are two main kinds of intellectual property, copyright and patents. Copyright protects works that are meant to be reproduced over and over for consumer use, like music or books. Patents are meant to protect the intellectual method of creating a product, not the actual work that is made, for example the way an industrial company processes a raw material.

In both cases the rights owner has a total monopoly the intellectual property until their rights run out, 20 years for patents and 70 years after the creator's death for copyright. It is also important to note that copyright law is very different from physical property laws. For example if I purchase a physical item like a stuffed animal I am free to modify or do whatever I please with that toy. If I purchase intellectual property like software though, copyright prevents me from modifying or doing whatever I please with the software.

Intellectual property is also unique because it can be reproduced at little to no cost thanks to new printing and computing technologies, unlike goods grounded in the physical world. These differences between intellectual and physical property raise new challenges and questions on how information is used and valued by society.