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Why Protect Your IP?
25 September 2003Christina Gates
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"The importance of protecting your Intellectual property"
The Irish Entrepreneur. September/October 2003.
Intellectual Property is a term given to the rights of ownership attached to an idea, a product, a design, a logo - in other words, the product of the human intellect.
Protection of your Intellectual Property (IP) is available to confirm your legal ownership of that output, thereby providing you with a statutory right to prevent the use of your product/design/logo etc by another party without your permission. Obtaining this exclusive right is essential in order to maintain your competitive advantage - the cornerstone to your business success.
Confirming and maintaining your competitive position in the market-place is reliant on developing a key aspect of your business which is yours and yours alone - something which will set you apart from your competitors and draw customer attention towards your product/service.
Holding the exclusive right to manufacture a particular product, or to use a particular design or trademark will allow you to step away from your competition, and give you a unique positioning within the market place.
The importance of preventing another party from copying or impersonating your innovation can be seen when you identify your IP, and how it is of a strategic and financial benefit to the overall success of your business. Once this is done, you will be able to see clearly how your IP can relate directly to your competitive advantage, and from there you will be able to develop a clear strategy for the protection and use of your IP.
There are a number of different forms of IP protection available, and the mix used by each organisation will differ depending on their activities. The most commonly obtained protection comes in the form of Patents, Registered Trademarks, Registered Designs and Copyright. In brief overview, these terms can be explained as follows:
Patent: A form of statutory protection for technical innovations whereby in return for disclosing his invention, the inventor (or his employer) receives the right to stop others using the invention for a limited period, usually of 20 years.
Registered Trademark: Registration of a trademark/logo/slogan, grants the owner the right to stop third parties using the registered trademark (or confusingly similar marks) in relation to particular goods and/or services. Trademark registration is available for a potentially infinite length of time.
Registered Design: A property right, renewable for a finite period, that grants the owner the exclusive right to use, and to authorise others to use, particular design/ aesthetic features of an article
Copyright: A property right under which the author of certain works has the right to authorise or prevent copying for the work, making the work available to the public, or making an adaptation of the work. Copyright is an unregistered right that is attributed to the work immediately upon its creation.
To ensure that you obtain the correct, and most strategically suitable protection for your IP, it is recommended that you engage the services of a qualified IP practitioner at the early stages of developing your IP strategy. Your IP advisor will work with you to identify the best form of protection available to suit your competitive requirements, and advise you on the most appropriate course of action for you to take.
Your IP advisor will work with you to identify how each of these forms of protection will relate to your requirements, and in addition to ensuring that the correct measures are taken to obtain protection for your IP, your patent or trademark attorney will assist you on all aspects of enforcement and transfer of your IP rights.
While preventing others from using your brand name or copying your innovative product is one of the primary reasons to protect your IP, there is another widely utilised advantage to obtaining IP protection. When you claim ownership of your IP, the same rights, which allow you to prevent others from using your brand name or copying your innovative product, enable you to dictate who can use them.
For many organisations, maintaining their exclusivity on a product/design/mark will be sufficient, however for others, ownership of IP rights will facilitate licensing agreements which will allow another party to use their IP rights in return for the payment of a royalty and within the terms set down by the licensing agreement.
Why protect your Intellectual Property? IP protection is about one thing - exclusivity of ownership. Registering ownership of your innovation gives you the exclusive right to set the terms of usage for your IP, thereby rewarding you, the innovator, with control over your 'product' for the investment of time, money and creativity made in developing it.
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