It can be difficult when you start up to know how to spend your resources. Keeping a tight rein on expenses is essential in the early days, but it’s equally important not to neglect important issues like intellectual property ...

How to protect your brand when you rebrand

Note: This post was written in 2014 and describes Azrights' rebrand at that time. The IP principles discussed remain fully applicable today. 

Our 2014 brand refresh involved a new l...

In this second blog post for ambitious start-ups during global entrepreneurship week, I focus on names, copyright and designs, as well as know how.

In this guide for start-ups, I focus on names, copyright and designs, as wel...

The Great British Bake Off isn’t just clever when it comes to cakes. By protecting its IP, it has been able to secure a fortune in licensing.

The other day I met someone who told me that she had been advised that it is not p...

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was an immediate success when it was first published selling 6,000 copies. Yet, as explored in an earlier post on copyright protection, Dickens made little money from it due to piracy. In ...

Intellectual property (IP) law will be relevant to every one of these businesses.  Yet MBA courses, books for start-ups, and entrepreneurship groups neglect IP law to a shocking extent.

Start-up publications and MBA courses ...

Images bring blog posts and articles alive. Downloading them from the Internet is just a matter of a few simple clicks. But are you infringing copyright if you use them? In the first of a two-part article on images, we look at ...

Content is important if you want to be found online. That’s well known. What is less understood is what the considerations are if someone asks to feature your content on their site.

With the proliferation of news aggregators,...

It is very common for people to be confused between different IP rights.  We often hear from individuals interested in “patenting” their brand, or “copyrighting” their invention, because there is a widespread lack of understan...

Nowadays many businesses are global from day one.

Even though you may just operate out of a bedroom in your home, when you sell online, you are potentially doing business in every country worldwide. That’s because the Intern...

The trouble with disregarding formalities, like legal agreements, is that even minor disagreements have the propensity to escalate into disputes.

An imperfect recollection of the terms of a contract is unlikely to escalate if th...

 Copying is so rife in business that if you have a profitable niche or concept, it would be surprising if competitors didn’t sooner or later try to capture some of your market share.

They will borrow freely from other businesse...