Business people Protect your Intellectual Property!

Theres no doubt that the real focus of business today is not factories and machines but ideas and information and the brains
that make them. This is probably even truer for the small entrepreneur than it is for the giant corporations. Ideas and
information in themselves do not belong to anyone, but if they are recorded in some way you may be able to protect them.
This article shows you how.
Copyright
An original work is a kind of property that belongs either to its author, or, if the author wrote or composed it in the course of
his employment, to his employer. The owner has an exclusive right to copy, perform, adapt or broadcast the work. It will be
an infringement if another person does these things without permission. One special feature of this kind of property is that it
does not last indefinitely. In UK law it used to finish fifty years after the calendar year in which the author died and this has
been extended to seventy years by The European Directive on Term of Protection of Copyright, 1993. Another unusual
feature is that the author retains some moral rights which are not assignable for example the right to be identified as the
author.
Patent
A patent is different from a copyright for two main reasons. Firstly, the invention has to be both novel and useful. Secondly,
the right to protection only appears when the invention has been granted a patent and registered. Until then you should keep it
secret - if an invention has already been made public in any way it is not novel. As for copyright, if the inventor had the idea
while they were at work it is likely to belong to their employer. Obtaining a patent is a long process, taking about 4 years.
The length of protection varies for different categories of invention, but can last for up to 20 years.
Registered design
If your product has a distinctive look and shape you may be able to protect it as a registered design. As with a patent, it is
important to keep your design secret until it is registered.
Trade Mark
A symbol or a name that you put on your product can be protected. It has to be different from any existing trade mark. Real
words, or slightly adapted real words, are not distinctive and so cannot be trade marks. A colour or a sound, if it is clearly
described and distinctive enough can be a trademark but a three-dimensional shape cannot. An application for a trade mark
must specify which types of goods the mark is to be used for.
Passing off
People who mislead buyers about something they are selling, for example by using trade marks or brand names that belong to
another business, may be guilty of the tort of 'passing off'.