What's the difference between intellectual property rights and patents?

Intellectual property refers to the exclusive rights enjoyed by natural persons, legal persons or other organizations according to law. Intellectual property rights can be roughly divided into two categories: one is industrial property rights, including patents, trademarks, prohibition of unfair competition, trade secrets, geographical indications and so on. The other is copyright (also called "copyright"), which involves literary, artistic and scientific works. Therefore, intellectual property rights cover patent rights, and patent rights are a kind of intellectual property rights. Patent is a document issued by the competent government department according to the application to record the content of invention and creation. In a certain period of time, a patented invention-creation can only be implemented by others with the permission of the patentee. In China, there are three kinds of patents: inventions, utility models and designs. Among them, the protection period of the invention patent is 20 years, and the protection period of the other two patents is 10 year (from June 20021year, the appearance patent was increased to 15 year).