Protecting Your Company’s Trade Secrets and Intellectual Property

In many ways, intellectual property (IP) is as much, if not more valuable than actual, tangible property. And yet, while we will keep physical property under lock and key, many business owners can get a bit sloppy about protecting their intellectual property.

Here are some common sense ways that your business can protect its intellectual property.

Treat IP as Confidential

Courts will look at your IP (which includes trade secrets or confidential information, not just copyrights or trademarks or patents) the same way that you treat them.

If you allow them to get loose, be accessed by a lot of people, keep little or no protections on them, and generally don’t try to enforce your exclusive rights to them, neither will a court if you go to court to try to protect your IP. It’s hard to convince a court that information is absolutely secret, when you haven’t treated that information that way in the past.

Document the Development

If you are developing information, processes, or property that you consider to be confidential IP, try to keep a log of how you developed it. What are the steps you took? What successes and failures did you experience? How much did it cost you? How much time did you spend on each task?

All of this will help document to a court that the information you have is the result of expense, time, and effort—something protectable as a confidential trade secret, as opposed to just being everyday information that anybody can access.

Registering With the Government

In some cases, your information may be able to be registered as IP with the US Patent and Trademark Office, or the US Copyright office. You never know when what you are doing may actually be protectable by federal registration. If at all possible, get your ideas registered, which can provide for a higher level of protection—and will make it easier to sue in the event that you need to enforce that IP.

Have Contracts With Those That Develop IP

As a general rule, under the work for hire doctrine, you (or your company) own any IP that is created by the company employees. But that doesn’t hold true for your buddies, friends, or outside contractors.

So, if you are asking someone that isn’t an employee to develop a song, slogan, design, or other piece of creative work, make sure that you have a contract specifying that whatever IP is created, actually belongs to you.

Enforce Your IP

We tend to want to avoid always sending demand letters, or rushing into court at every possible dispute.

But when it comes to IP, you may have to do just that. Allowing your IP to be used by others, can weaken, if not altogether eliminate, your ability to sue for infringement later on. Don’t just sit back and do nothing when you see other people using or misappropriating your IP.

Let us help you keep confidential information secret. Let the West Palm Beach commercial litigation lawyers at Pike & Lustig help you with your trade secret case today.

Source:

copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf