What is your intellectual property and how should you protect it? Intellectual property is something you create that’s unique. It is something you invent, like a new product or a product’s design or appearance or a brand or logo or written work, like content on a website, in a brochure, artistic work, like photography, illustration, film recordings, musical compositions, computer software etc.. You can’t protect an idea – but you can often protect what you do with it. For example, you can’t protect an idea for a book. But if you write it, you can protect the words you’ve written. Protecting your intellectual property is crucial to the success of your business. How you protect your intellectual property depends on what types of intellectual property you have.
What is a Patent?
If your business has developed a new and better product or process that is unique, useful, and non-obvious you will want to protect the competitive advantage this gives you by obtaining a patent. The holder of a patent can stop third parties from making, using or selling his invention for a period of years depending on the type of invention. If your business is one in which inventions are created on a continuing basis, it is very important that you have a clear understanding about who owns the inventions. Does your business own the inventions or do the employees who create the inventions own them? This can depend on the type of work arrangement you have. You will want to make sure workers sign an agreement that any inventions created by them while working for your business belong to the business.
What is a Copyright?
A copyright provides protection for original works of authorship, fixed in a tangible medium of expression including literary, musical, and dramatic works, as well as photographs, audio and visual recordings, software, and other intellectual works. Copyright protection begins as soon as the work is fixed in a tangible medium. The author should begin using the copyright symbol immediately as a method of informing others that he intends to exercise control over the production, distribution, display, and or performance of the work. While it is not necessary to file for copywriting protection, doing so will make it easier to seek court enforcement of your copyright.
What is a Trademark?
A trademark protects the name of your product by preventing other business from selling a product under the same name. Having a unique and identifiable name for your product is an advantage for your business. Trademark law seeks to protect consumers from confusion or deception by preventing other businesses from using the same or a confusingly similar name for their products. A servicemark is used when what your business sells is a service rather than a product. Being the first to use the name is important to protect the continuing right to use the name, but filing is important for enforcement purposes. The first step in filing for trademark registration is performing a trademark search. This step is extremely important because it could prevent you from investing a lot in the promotion of a product under a trademark that is already in use.
Intellectual property protection is a important thing in protecting your product. Without Intellectual property protection, there is nothing that legally prevents anyone that wants to, from copying and marketing your product. This would mean that all your hard work in developing your idea into a working, viable product would have been for nothing. Unless it is protected, anyone can go into production and market their version of your product to leading retailers or manufacturers without any recourse available to you, the actual inventor. Whether you are an experienced inventor, or just happened to come up with an innovative idea and have developed it into a viable product, the most important thing you can do to protect your work is to get any of the intellectual property protection.Put quite bluntly, if you have come up with a good or innovative product and it is not protected by any of the above said, you can pretty much rest assured someone will take your idea, make a knock-off of it and start manufacturing and selling it. To make absolutely sure that no one copies your product or a similar product that will compete with yours, you have to apply for the intellectual property protection.