Throughout your life, there may be various reasons why you may need to protect your intellectual property.  Intellectual property is essentially those things that you’ve created that are unique and provide you with some financial benefit. 

Examples of intellectual property include:

Inventions

Original written work

Artistic designs or other creations

Proprietary business or personal trade secrets

There are a different ways to protect each type of intellectual property listed above.  The following guide will help you to determine what type of protection that you need based on the type of intellectual property that you need to protect.

Orlando Patents

Patents are typically used if you or the business you own has created a new and unique product that can be useful and valuable in the marketplace.  In this case, you would want to protect your idea, and the competitive business advantage that it offers you, by obtaining a patent for the invention. 

A patent prevents others from manufacturing or selling the product without your permission for a certain timeframe.  The process can be confusion and typically requires a patent attorney to navigate through the many patent laws. 

Most businesses require employees to sign a waver stating that any inventions created in the process of working at the company is owned in full by the company.  Without such an agreement, the person creating the invention would hold certain rights to the intellectual property they’ve created.

Orlando Copyrights

Writers are most familiar with the form of protection provided to the intellectual property of writing, called the copyright.  A copyright protects all original authored content including music, writing, software, and art.  In the United States, legal copyright protection is implied when the intellectual property is in a fixed medium such as a book, movie format, or web page.  An author simply needs to use the copyright symbol on their work, because it is not required that copyrights are filed for protection to become active.  However there are cases when a copyright should be filed – so if you are concerned whether your intellectual property in this form is properly protected, it’s always best to consult an attorney and ask.

Orlando Trademarks

When it comes to branding – trademarks are critical.  Trademarks are specifically intended to protect the name or logo of your product or business.  Establishing a trademark prevents other businesses from conducting business under your business name or using your logo.  Courts look at this form of intellectual property in terms of who used the name first, and who filed for the trademark first. 

Every new business should consider first doing a trademark search for the name or product they intend to use.  It would be a tremendous waste of resources to promote and build a business around a particular name only to learn years later, upon going to trademark the brand that the name of your business is already in use.  An attorney can assist with the process of conducting a trademark search as well as applying for a trademark.