If you’re an entrepreneur, inventor or small business owner, your goods and services are not the only source of value of your business. You can maximize some of that value through carefully cultivating the intellectual property you create through operating your business.
You can improve and protect your brand through trademarks, or monopolize your innovations through patent rights. Copyrights protect your creative creations and you can keep essential know-how away from your competitors through trade secrets.
You will want to ensure that your invention, brand or original work is protected by consulting an intellectual property lawyer in Mesa, AZ. Here are a few benefits of consulting an intellectual property attorney:
Safeguard Your Creative Content
By having an intellectual property attorney apply for a patent, trademark or copyright, you can formally safeguard your business’s important content, products and ideas.
These registrations can serve as tools to ensure others inside and outside of your business do not make, use or sell your intellectual property and add value to your business.
Until you have adequate protection, you may waste time and strain relationships by having to negotiate non-disclosure agreements. Without these protections in place, someone can take your ideas. Then it becomes much more expensive to prove that your ideas were stolen.
The odds of beating these intellectual property thieves are much higher if you have carefully considered and adopted the formal protections offered by the law.
Protect Early & Protect Carefully
As soon as you start developing and implementing your business or product idea, you should start to think about how you should protect your intellectual property.
The first step is to identify which part of your business is protectable. These protections can be in the form of a patent, trademark, copyright or trade secret.
Each of these protections require different procedures to keep others from stealing your ideas. Your intellectual property lawyer in Mesa, AZ can help you develop a strategy that will help protect your invention, brand, original work or secret sauce.
It’s Your Business, Protect It
If you are a business owner developing a unique process or product, make sure the title to your intellectual property is clear by having all members and employees sign agreements that state all intellectual property rights will be assigned over to the Company.
In addition, if you are contracting someone else to do the work for your company, make sure a Contractor Agreement states that the work product is a work made for hire and that all rights to any intellectual property developed by the contractor belong to your company.
All too often we see that companies have hired outside contractors and the Agreements do not state that the company will own any original works developed by the contractor.
Don’t fall into this trap. Make sure you have the necessary Agreements in place to protect your business. When you need help to protect your business’ intellectual property, contact HPS Law Group .
