How To Protect Your Intellectual Property Rights Even In A Recession

January 10, 2011

A Business’ IP is often the most valuable asset it generates.  So just neglecting to protect your IP in these recessionary times when budgets are tight can have adverse and long term implications—especially if there is a time limited window within which your IP may be registered.

To avoid a large hole in your IP portfolio when trade picks up, it’s important to be savvy during these tough times, and manage your Intellectual Property actively by either taking advice on strategy, or having an IP audit if you have an IP portfolio.

IP Audit

An IP audit is a great way to review your domain, trade mark, design or patent registrations. It will look to identify ways in which you may consolidate your portfolio or make savings. If you’re lucky, there may even be unexpected surprises, such as product licensing opportunities that may have been overlooked.

An IP audit helps in prioritising those IP rights that add value, whilst weeding out non-essential or redundant ones by letting them lapse or consolidating them to avoid paying renewal fees.

Strategic consultation

If you are a smaller business, consider having a strategy consultation. With the access to information that the internet has opened up, it is easy for SMEs to assume that they do not need to pay for advice.  So they will often do their own research, decide whether they need to register a trade mark, or design, and then buy that service.

Often the opportunity to find out about other IPR protection, such as trade secrets, or copyrights is missed, as is the possibility of establishing from an experienced practitioner whether there are alternative ways of achieving your desired objectives.  These could well be more cost effective.

For example, we often find that SMEs are really keen to protect their logos with trade marks, but are less concerned about trade marking their name.  Yet protecting the name is generally far more important, and there are other ways of protecting logos which are missed.

OBIS – Do Your Own IP registrations?

Proper advice, combined with doing your own registrations, could be a cost effective way forward during these recessionary times. Our product OBIS which was released in beta last month enables you to do some of your own legal work under our overall guidance.

This includes trade mark and design registration. DIY may not appeal to everyone, but if the alternative is to fail to protect essential IP, then it is preferable to not securing essential registrations. Using an assisted self help system such as that available on OBIS is better than simply doing your own registration by using the IPO’s assistance.  The IPO is very helpful, but will not check your form to pick up some of the glaring mistakes I have seen SMEs make when they file their own trade mark applications.

Product naming

Another useful step to reduce outgoings during these tough times may be to put in place a policy to guide your marketing team when selecting product names. Some name choices may reduce clearance costs.

Failing to have proper trade mark searches is a serious risk which no business should run. However, it may be feasible to opt for less extensive searches if they would be good enough to guard against the risk of infringing on the rights of others. By consulting an experienced intellectual property lawyer, you will be able to put in place a search strategy for your business which will be appropriate to the risks in your industry, and to the type of product you are releasing.

Other brand protection measures not to be neglected

Other basic preventative steps you may want to consider to reduce your legal exposure are to register your name on popular social networking sites, and paying relatively small sums to have company and trade mark watch services in place which will help you catch problems early and avoid more costly litigation later.

Remember too that a patent only gives you a right to stop others using your invention. Consider whether you have all the necessary permissions you need to make your product.

The key is to make your investment in IP go as far as possible, taking steps now to protect it, and avoid problems instead of having to overcome them later.