Posts Tagged ‘Trademark’

Intellectual property, from copyrights on your marketing materials to patents on the processes you use to create your products, are crucial to your business’ ability to keep on earning money. It’s easy for a business owner to focus more on physical assets, but it’s also important to protect the less tangible pieces of your business. Similarly, you want to make sure that your business isn’t infringing on other companies’ intellectual property — if only to avoid costly legal problems.

Planning for Protection

“The first thing small business owners can do to protect their own intellectual property is to recognize its value and plan for it like you would any other element of your business plan,” says Chrissie Scelsi, who specializes in media law. She points out that the first step that any business owner should take is to appropriately register your intellectual property with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. While it may be possible to protect your claim to a particular piece of intellectual property without registering it, in most legal matters, problems can come down to who has the paperwork from the USPTO.

You should also create internal systems for checking up on the possibility of infringement. There are many new tools that make the process easier. Scelsi says, “As you proceed in business, also keep an eye on the competition and what they are doing relative to your intellectual property. Has someone adopted a similar store name down the street? Did your Google alert come up with another party using your business name or trademark? Run a search periodically for similar business and product names. Be vigilant, once you have registered or acted otherwise to protect your intellectual property, you don’t want to let down your guard. This applies to employees that leave, particularly if you have an invention or trade secret.”

Protect Yourself from Other Business’ Problems

Getting pulled into a legal dispute over intellectual property can be an expensive proposition. Not only is it important to avoid actual cases of infringement, but avoid even the appearance of violating another company’s intellectual property. Setting policies in place that help you to research any new trademark, project or even web copy can help protect you. Even if the policy is little more than running a search on Google before you start the trademark process, you can save yourself a lot of time down the road.

Scelsi also suggests ensuring that you own all intellectual property associated with your business. “Small business owners also should work from the word go to make sure that they own anything that is created for them. This means that if you have a logo created for your business, have the designer sign an agreement or put in writing that you indeed own that logo and have all rights to it.” If intellectual property is created specifically for your business, you have less to worry about when it comes to unintentionally infringing on another company’s intellectual property.

Image by Flickr user Horia Varlan