By: Erik J. Martin
You can safeguard your business’s physical assets like the office, goods and equipment with an insurance policy. But how do you protect intangibles like your company’s name, logo, content, creative ideas or original creations from being stolen? The answer is to secure trademarks, copyrights, patents and other intellectual property rights.
According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, intellectual property refers to “creations of the mind,” like artistic or literary works, names, images, symbols, designs and inventions used for business purposes.
“These are comprised substantially of ideas and know-how, which are incapable of being locked up for safe keeping but vulnerable to being grabbed and republished by anyone else who may know of them,” said Maribeth Meluch, registered patent attorney and partner with Isaac Wiles Burkholder and Teetor.
Consider how easy it is for your intellectual property to be infringed upon. If you’re a homebuilder, a competitor could copy or emulate your floorplan design. If you run a website that offers self-help articles, another site could reproduce some of your content without your permission. Or, if you own a store, a rival may decide to open a store with the same name within a few miles of yours.
Read more >> https://www.uschamber.com/co/start/strategy/how-to-protect-intellectual-property?cid=search
