Skip to content
Skip to main content
header search
ahihi OpenLearn
OpenLearn
Menu
sticky search

About this free course

Become an OU student

Download this course

Share this free course

Course content Course content
A freelance career in the creative arts
A freelance career in the creative arts

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

More free courses

5.1 Intellectual Property (IP)

Intellectual property protection can help you to stop people from stealing or copying your work. This can be done through copyright, patents, designs and trade marks.

Gov.uk (no date, a) explains:

Intellectual property (IP) is something that you create using your mind – for example, a story, an invention, an artistic work or a symbol. You own IP if you:

  • created it (and it meets the requirements for copyright, a patent or a design)
  • bought intellectual property rights from the creator or a previous owner
  • have a brand that could be a trade mark, for example, a well-known product name.

If you’re self-employed, you usually own the intellectual property even if your work was commissioned by someone else – unless your contract with them gives them the rights.

You usually will not own the intellectual property for something you created as part of your work while you were employed by someone else.

Depending on the nature of your business, another IP-related consideration might be design protection. Watch this short video about the experiences of designer Nicole Phillips.

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 4
Copy this transcript to the clipboard
Print this transcript
Show transcript|Hide transcript

Transcript: Video 4

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NICOLE PHILLIPS:
I started my company in 2012, Nicole Phillips England, where I realised that my watercolours would look beautiful on fabric. So I started with a range of tea towels and then I progressed onto hop covers, double oven gloves, tablecloths, napkins, aprons, endless. And now I have 21 tea towel designs and numerous fabric-by-the-metre designs.
Nicole Philips England is all about fresh, quirky, bit of colour, the juxtaposition of the watercolour against the graphic lines. Sometimes I use wording. It's just a bit of fun and humour in the kitchen. And I feel that it's quite different than what's out there at the moment, so I feel that we have to register that design because if someone was to steal them, it would be devastating to me, and it's happened to me before.
I studied ceramics at university and got my BA in Bath. And I was selected at the end of the degree show to exhibit top at London for the new designers' exhibition. And it was there that I got approached by a large retailer. You can imagine I was over the moon, very excited. I found their business card in the bottom of this jug, and I got home, and I actually didn't see it until a couple of weeks later and I found it in there. And I was like, yay.
And I approached them, and they were very excited, and they seemed really keen. They took samples, and I spent a lot of money and time preparing for this big order. And then out of the blue, the communication stopped and they said they weren't interested. Obviously, gutted. But then a few months later, I went up to their shop, their big one in London, and I looked round, and there was an inferior version.
And I was gutted-- really gutted. But now, because I'm older and wiser, I've had all my intellectual property protected.
We've protected each of our watercolour designs as a registered design, which protects the appearance and the look of the design so that I can put it on anything and it's protected, whether it's stationary, or ceramics, or textiles. We now have a trademark attorney to help us because we have so many registered designs.
It's not expensive to register designs. It can be as little as 60 pounds. And this protects you up to 25 years, and this is hugely reassuring for a company like mine when we're being approached by big retailers and trade shows. The design laws changed last year, which means that anybody who intentionally tries to copy one of my registered designs can face up to 10 years in prison, which is fantastic news for a company like me.
As a UK company, I make everything in the UK from start to finish, from my watercolour through to the fabric to the production. And I feel really strongly about that and want to stay British-based. But if someone was to go abroad and do a cheaper, nastier copy, because I've registered all my designs, it makes it a lot easier for me to take legal action.
My advice for any artist going into business is to consider if your product can be a registered design. If it can, go ahead and do it. It's not that much money and it gives you really great reassurance that hopefully, if anyone tried to copy you, you'd have some legal rights over it. So my advice is to think about your intellectual property and to protect it at an early stage.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

End transcript: Video 4
Download
Video 4
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

How would you go about protecting your designs?

50% of UK small businesses think it’s important to prevent others from copying the look or appearance of their product (Allford, no date). In the creative industries, it can help you protect your brand, designs and artwork from potential copycats and infringers.