2 Why is IP important?
Intellectual property laws are intended to promote technical ingenuity and cultural creativity by granting private ownership rights.
There are several important practical reasons why you should protect your IP. You should do so in order to:
protect it against infringement by others and ultimately defend in the courts your sole right to use, make, sell or import it
stop others using, making, selling or importing it without your permission
earn royalties by licensing it
exploit it through strategic alliances
make money by selling it.
The importance of IP and its protection is demonstrated by the fact that the US Patent and Trademark Office alone receives more than 500,000 new patent applications each year (United States Patent and Trademark Office, 2015). The equivalent figure in Europe is over 300,000 new patent filings each year (European Patent Office, 2017).
Non-disclosure agreements
Before engaging with potential investors, advisors, suppliers or, indeed, any other third party, it is important that you consider signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
A non-disclosure agreement:
is a legal contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties wish to share with one another for certain purposes, but wish to restrict access to or by third parties.
As the UK’s Intellectual Property Office points out: ‘It is important that you don’t assume conversations with advisors are automatically confidential’ (Intellectual Property Office, 2015b).
While an NDA is not a guarantee that your idea and discussions will remain confidential, it will at least give you some protection and recourse should it be needed.
At any stage of the innovation process, from invention to diffusion, a bright idea with market potential can be a target for inadvertent or even unscrupulous copying. The invention of the telephone, movie projector and television would fall into this category (Thompson, 2012).
Equally, however, it is not unknown for different groups of people to be working on similar ideas in parallel or for members of a team to be contributing different ideas, meaning that the origins of inventive ideas might be difficult to identify with precision.
The story of the invention of Facebook is a recent case in point. While the social media platform might be most associated in the public mind with Mark Zuckerberg, actual ownership and invention rights have been disputed by members of the team who created the first prototype. This was famously depicted in the 2010 film The Social Network.
It is consequently sensible for inventors to establish their claim to a particular invention and to protect it against unauthorised exploitation by others.
Choosing not to protect your IP
Curiously, on occasion people consciously choose not to patent or otherwise protect their IP. Why?
For some it is because they have moral objections to ideas, etc. as intellectual property (the open-source computer operating system Linux is a classic example), while others do not wish to fully disclose the nature of their innovation as would be required by a patent filing. Yet others see it as perhaps being too much hard work, though this can lead to subsequent challenges if others start using your idea.
1 What is intellectual property?