[Reynolds]

Well as it's been postead above, broadly, everything that has popped out of your mind first (in law it's called "original work") on the world is your intellectual property. You, as the owner of that property, has several exclusive rights which are recognised in most jurisdictions all over the world.

One of them is copyright, which is applicable to any substantive information. It was originally the right to copy your work, but if you hold the copyright of the material, you can also adopt, display, sell the property. You, and only you, hence the name "exclusive rights". You can share these rights (creative commons) or you can waive it (pulbic domain). The full set of these rights can be found on the Wikipedia.

That's why we have patents, trademarks. Because the copyright is only one group of these rights, and it's only applicable for certain types of Intellectual Property. For example, patents are for inventions (you hold the right to recreate or sell the invention), trademarks are for smybols and words, phases, logos, etc.

The big difference between copyright & trademarks/patents is that the last two must be generally registered if you want to hold the trademark/patent rights.

All of the above is general, it varies by jurisdictions.