IP rights are integral to most businesses and their protection presents a variety of options.
Assessing options will involve detailed analysis of the business and its activities.
Seeking advice on an IP strategy early in a business venture can help in ensuring the best return from intellectual assets.
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What's an IP Strategy and Where Can I Get One?
Most businesses are involved in innovation. Even the very step of coming up with a business idea and starting to put it into practice can involve or potentially involve innovation and the creation of intellectual property. At its most basic creating a new business brand involves creating an abstract object that can be protected by intellectual property law, in this case by trade marking. For many businesses and organisations it will be worth formally considering an IP Strategy for the business or business venture.
The idea of ownership of physical property has probably been with us since the first agricultural societies. Intellectual property ownership is a much newer concept, going back only a few hundred years. Businesses and organisations both large and small tend to give less emphasis to their intellectual assets than they represent in terms of the earning potential of their activities. Developing an IP Strategy as part of the overall business plan can help to secure this potential. Stated very briefly an IP Strategy will be an overall plan to make the best use of available legal tools to protect and obtain a return from the intellectual assets of the business.
Tools available to protect valuable intellectual investment in a business can be daunting and present a welter of options including:
trade marking
patent protection
copyright
designs
confidential information
contract arrangements
and more
How to make best use of these tools for each particular business is dependent on both the nature of the business and its key products.
For example, a business basing itself on one product - say a new kind of highly competitive coffee strainer, might look at trade marking a brand for the product to promote its distinctive identity. Patenting the invention would also be an obvious step to minimise the chance of others copying (or attempting to copy) the strainer. If there are a limited number of ways that the coffee strainer can be designed, obtaining design protection might be an additional or alternative strategy. Design protection can prevent another company from copying the way a product looks (something that can be particularly valuable if the competing product will show up on the shelves right next to yours).
If the business is a designer but not a manufacturer and wants to bring in others to undertake manufacturing, then the company would look at appropriate contractual arrangements to ensure it gets the benefit of its IP. Such arrangements are really specialist contracts and should be advised on by an experienced IP adviser.
If the strainer is one of many products that the business is planning to release in the marketplace, the business would also look at its own brand as a key way of promoting sales of individual products.
Protecting IP even in this circumstance will go beyond these issues. For instance who designed the strainer? Was it under an employment relationship or other arrangement? The business would want to ensure that it has proper legal documentation in place to ensure its ownership of the IP can't be challenged.
As another example, a producer of a board game has a variety of options for protection, up to and including patent protection. Design protection can be obtained for each of the game elements (e.g. plastic figures), copyright will apply in relation to game rules, trade marks can be used to ensure the game has a distinctive and protected place in the market.
Artists, designers, software producers, service providers all face IP issues that should be analysed and appropriately addressed.
When developing an IP strategy it's worth seeking professional advice as to the available options and what is a best fit for your business. Steps taken when a product or service is first launched can ensure the best outcomes for the business, and that valuable options are not ruled out. For instance selling an unpatented product will generally mean that patent protection can no longer be obtained.