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For business opportunity seekers and smaller businesses, the world is becoming a much smaller place than it was only a decade ago. Even the smallest businesses can conduct business internationally, and almost every business can project their businesses across the worldwide web with little effort. Unfortunately, the broader the reach of your business, the more important it is to secure and protect your intellectual property.
What is Intellectual Property?
Your intellectual property are creative expressions both artistic and commercial. Such property encompasses a wide variety of manifestations including: music, photos, words, writing, look and feel of software, software code, graphics, artwork, designs, symbols, inventions, processes, and much more.
Typical Types of Small Business Intellectual Property
If you’re in business you’ve probably already created certain categories of intellectual property. For example, you business name, product names, your logo, your website content, your domain name, your brochures or selling collateral, are all forms of intellectual property. If your business also manufactures, designs, or researches products or processes, you may other sources of intellectual property.
Why protect it? Because it’s valuable.
Intellectual property is valuable. The brand name that you’ve spent thousands of dollars associated with high quality merchandise can be ruined in an afternoon by someone selling cheap knock-off articles under the same brand. The domain name you paid $15 to register, might be worth thousands later. In March of 2009, the domain name toys.com was acquired for $5.1 million dollars!
Some level of protection isn’t difficult.
For most businesses in North America, providing some degree of protection to their intellectual property is not difficult. The simple annotation of many items with a “© 2009. All rights reserved.” Or by marketing appropriate items with a “tm” (trademark) or “sm” (service mark) is enough to afford a certain level of protection.
A few guidelines to observe include:
- Place a “tm” or “sm” on the first use of any special mark or logo that is important to you. Apply a footnote that declares “XXXX is a trademark of Yourcompany, Inc.”
- Add copyright statements on any document that you believe has any material proprietary value to you. Make sure the year is noted for all years in which edits or additions have been made. E.g. “© 2009, 2010. All rights reserved.”
- NEVER allow Internet providers or web service providers to register your domain in their name.
- If there are names, marks or materials that you think are especially important to your business, register them with the trademark, copyright and patent authority in your country.
- If you believe you have patentable processes, formulas, designs or other property, make and keep a meticulous record of the history of its creation. Then get and intellectual property attorney to help with the registration.
- To ensure that you’re not slapping a “tm” on something already registered, do a quick lookup of the mark in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office TESS database (http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=4008:e9iiag.1.1). It’s free and potentially can save you a lot of wasted time and effort.
In all events, if you have concerns about whether you are protecting your intellectual property sufficiently, of if you feel that your intellectual property has been violated, do contact an intellectual property attorney as soon as possible.
Treat Others As You Would Be Treated
Lastly, on the other side of the intellectual property discussion, don’t misuse the marks or copyrighted materials of other companies. It can be costly. Never use such materials in any way that it might cause confusion in the marketplace and therefore harm to the owner of the mark or material. Often a simple footnote attribution is sufficient to avoid such confusion – e.g. “xxx is a trademark of the YYY company.” or referring to the company’s name before the brand – e.g. “Microsoft Outlook”.
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