The Need for Intellectual Property Protection
Many companies, especially small ones, don’t take the prudent measures necessary to protect the core assets of their business. Often this is only discovered during due diligence for crucial issues like raising money or selling the business. Owners of successful businesses can be shocked to discover that the business is only worth a fraction of their expectation because key technology and know-how has been put in the public domain and therefore is readily available to competitors at little cost. Valuable assets such as patents that could be used as collateral for loans are absent and barriers to entry for competitors are negligible because the technology is freely available.
It is not just about patents. Every key aspect of the business from fundamental technology to the commercial brands should be protected so that the whole enterprise is worth more than the sum of the parts. Without these protections in place the business may be little more than a client list and leased premises.
Increasingly as manufacturing moves to low cost economies it is vital that the differentiating and profit generating characteristics of the business that are based on its technology and designs are ring-fenced and protected.
The first step on the road to protecting these assets is to audit the enterprise to ensure that the key elements have been identified. Then a strategy to protect them and enhance the value of the company can be developed.
Protecting IP need not be expensive. Design Registration at the Intellectual Property Office costs from £60 and a Trade Mark costs from £200. An initial patent can be filed for no cost to get a priority date for the application and can cost as little as £200 to bring it into effect. However in the case of technical patents it is usually worth employing a Patent Attorney to draw up the patent to make sure that it is robust and this could cost several thousand pounds depending on the complexity. In such cases its important to get the strategy right and make sure that the right things are being protected. Copyright is free and automatic but it’s important to make sure that important documents are recognised and marked as such. This doesn’t add anything to the legal force of the protection but it puts potential competitors and others on notice that the work is protected and should not be copied.
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