You and your team have probably put a lot of energy into building your business. It is therefore quite logical to think of protecting the latter, as well as the inventions which result from it. However, figuring out how to do this with copyrights and trademarks can be confusing.
In this tutorial, I show you the differences between three types of intellectual property protection. Then we'll see the two ways they affect your business to protect your creations and avoid legal problems with other companies.
The importance of protecting your intellectual property
“Intellectual property” basically refers to anything you create. This includes the contents (such as blog posts), original designs or images, or even e-books. This also includes your brand elements, such as your brand name, logo and any other distinctive elements. And finally, this includes inventions, or new technological processes.
Protecting your company's intellectual property is essential. If you do not protect your contents, other people can copy it, pass it off as their own and use it to make money. The same goes for your inventions – their protection ensures you exclusive enjoyment.
Failure to protect your brand could seriously damage your company's image. Without protection, your brand can be used by other people to deceive customers or damage your brand's reputation. The consequences of not protecting your intellectual property are serious and could cost you a lot of income.
The difference between copyrights, trademarks and patents
In short, copyrights, trademarks, and patents all protect different types of intellectual property. Knowing when to apply the right protection ensures that all of your creations remain safe in your control.
Copyright
Copyrights protect content, such as text or images, and determine how the contents may be legally reproduced and distributed. You may be familiar with copyright as a protection used for books and films. Copyright laws are what make it illegal to record movies in theaters.
You get copyright as soon as you produce content and share it. If you write a blog post and post it online, you technically have the copyright. However, unless you register the copyright, you don't have a lot of power if someone steals and redistributes your content.
Copyright is infringed when you reproduce and distribute someone else's content without permission. Sometimes this also extends to the creation of derivative works, or content remarkably similar to copyrighted content.
Registered trademarks
Trademarks or TradeMark Protect Your Brand, including your logo, brand and other features associated with it. This could include a slogan, packaging, or even some designs. Burberry, for example, has registered the trademark of the verification pattern used on many of its products.
Just like copyright, you get a trademark as soon as you start using it, but it's hard to exert legal influence without registering it. Your brand is infringed if another company uses the identifying features of your brand, or similar brands, to sell products or services.
Licences
Finally, patents protect inventions, new technologies or processes. A patent prevents others from recreating and distributing your invention for a set period of time, usually twenty years. This allows you to reap all the rewards of your invention from its first appearance on the market.
To get a patent, you need to submit an application that includes detailed documentation on how you came up with your idea and how you carried it out. It is essential to keep your invention confidential before you receive your patent, otherwise other people could recreate it, thus rendering your application invalid.
Infringing a patent is the use or dissemination of an invention without permission. You can choose to allow certain parties to legally use or distribute your invention by selling licenses.
How Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents Affect Your Business
By learning about the impact intellectual property protections have on your business, you will help your business avoid legal problems. It's important for your entire team to know how copyrights, trademarks, and patents affect your business.
1. Protect the intellectual property of your company
As we saw earlier in this article, it's important to protect your company's intellectual property to prevent other companies from taking advantage of you. By understanding the differences between protections, you can prevent others from stealing your work - and know what to do if it is stolen.
If your business produces for-profit content, such as eBooks or software, it's important to protect it with a registered copyright. This way you can take action if someone tries to copy it. However, if you are creating content for clients, it is your client's responsibility to obtain a registered copyright for the content.
Your logo, brand name, and tagline are the most common and identifiable branding elements that you should use as a brand. Saving each item separately provides the best protection. Keep in mind that this process can be expensive and you might want to wait until your brand is generating revenue to do it.
If your business has developed new technology or new processes, you can apply for a patent and prevent others from making money selling your invention. However, you cannot patent an idea. You must therefore fully develop your invention before you can patent it, and keep your concept secret in the meantime.
2. Prevent your team from committing an accidental or intentional offense
The last thing any business owner or manager wants is a lawsuit against their business. By making sure your team knows how to avoid breaches and the resulting consequences, you will avoid legal issues with other businesses.
To avoid copyright infringement, encourage your team to use content under Creative Commons license. This content is free for anyone to use and distribute. It is also important to always cite the sources of ideas, text, and other content borrowed from sources.
It's a little harder to accidentally violate trademarks. By setting guidelines for your team on how to use (or not use) other brands' features, however, you can ensure there is no mistake. In addition, you can search the database of data to see if there are any trademarks similar to yours before you start using them.
Accidentally infringing patents is surprisingly easy. No one can know every invention ever published, and you can come up with what you think is an original idea, until you find someone else patented it first. Perform a analysis before launching a new product or service is a smart security measure.
How to decide if you should protect your website by copyright
Whether or not to register a copyright for your web content can be a tricky decision. Some don't feel the need, because the content is copyrighted upon publication. However, registering a copyright on your site allows you to take action if the content is copied.
However, registering a copyright can be expensive. This is especially true as a registered copyright will only protect the content on your site at the time of registration, not new content - you will need to keep renewing the registration. New sites with little content are unlikely to benefit much.
On the other hand, if you have a large library of revenue-generating content, a copyright may be worth it. Suppose you publish a practical style blog post that earns ad revenue. Without a registered copyright, someone else could afford to copy your content, use it on their site, and compete with your post for readers.
In this case, the copycat could earn advertising money that would have been yours if you had been able to stop them from stealing your content and readers. An investment in a registered copyright might have been worth it if you could deter the copyist or take legal action against them.
Conclusion
Once you know the differences between copyrights, trademarks, and patents, protecting your business becomes easier. You can prevent others from stealing your work and make sure your team also knows how to avoid committing an offense.
In this article, we have discussed the differences between copyrights, trademarks, and patents. We have also noted two important effects of these protections on your business:
- Protect the intellectual property of your company.
- Prevent your team from committing an accidental or intentional offense.
