Joinup glossary

A patent is a government-issued and approved document that grants an inventor the exclusive rights to an invention for a fixed period of time. The exclusive rights in reference to patents mean that the patented invention may only be exploited by another party with authorisation by the inventor or IP holder.

The hallmark of proprietary software licences is that the software publisher grants a licence to use one or more copies of software, but that ownership of those copies remains with the software publisher.