Protecting your business’s Intellectual Property

Rachel Jones at SnapDragon Monitoring explains why protecting commercial IP is so critical and offers advice about how to go about it and what resources to use

 

It’s been over two years since the world was first tumbled into the unknown.

 

Not only did the pandemic impact every area of our personal lives, it also resulted in us evaluating our professional lives, leading to a surge in over 700,000 new businesses being founded in 2020 in the UK alone.  

 

Many of these pandemic-born businesses were birthed in homes and saw people taking their hobbies, such as jewellery or pasta making, and turning them into fulltime, successful careers.

 

But, as any entrepreneur will testify, starting a new business adventure is not always easy.

 

There is so much uncertainty in what lies ahead, with a focus on whatever is going to create sales the quickest, whether through marketing and advertising or creating stock. Valuable though this is, longer-term planning is frequently overlooked in the early days, particularly when it comes to understanding and registering Intellectual Property (IP).

 

Every business starts with an idea, and every business owns or uses some form of IP. This could include your website, business name or logo, through to assets such as innovative technologies, know-how, designs - or even a secret recipe.

 

IP provides protection to business leaders, entrepreneurs, and creators to keep products and inventions safe from other brands, or fraudsters, making copycat versions and banking on your success.

 

But, to many first-time business leaders, it can often be hard to see your products as successful, or something that will be counterfeited, especially in the very early days when you are just getting started. However, further down the line, when the early days are long gone by and business is flourishing, it is often then that IP, or the lack of attention to it, comes back to haunt you.  

 

When competitors and fraudsters see that a company has developed a successful product, this will often result in them making copycat versions so they too can reap a slice of the lucrative pie. If the original brand hasn’t done anything to protect its IP, they could then face costly court battles against these companies who are trying to infringe their brand.

 

This is a situation no business ever wants to find itself in.

 

Firstly, it could mean another person or company is making money through products that they never created, while secondly it could cause irreparable brand damage. If a customer is duped into purchasing a copycat product that is branded in the exact same way as the genuine brand, when the product fails, or doesn’t function in the way it should, it is often the genuine brand that receives the negativity.

 

To protect against the threat posed by rip-offs and counterfeits, researching and registering IP is critical, so where do you begin?

 

Protecting IP

 

“It will always be cheaper and simpler to take steps to identify and protect the IP that exists within your business than risk a potentially costly and lengthy dispute with a competitor. For example, by registering a trademark with the Intellectual Property Office (IPO). The IPO has an experienced business engagement team, and we love talking to businesses of all types and sizes to help guide them through the most important issues related to IP when trading at home or abroad.” Becky Eddolls, Intellectual Property Office’s Head of Business Education and Support

 

It is very helpful for organisations to educate themselves on IP and the different ways to protect their assets. These include:

• Trademarks: Your brand is a powerful tool – and trademarks protect brands. This could be for a business name, a product, or a service. The trademark could be made up of words, logos, or a combination of both and can even be sound or action based.
• Registered designs: These protect the overall visual appearance of a product.
• Copyright: This protects literature, artistic works, photographs, music, dramatic works, software, databases, films, radio and television broadcasts, sound recordings and published editions.
• Patents: These protect new inventions and cover how products work, what they do, how they do it, what they are made of and how they are made.

The UK Intellectual Property Office’s free online IP for Business tools and training are a great place to begin when taking a new business to market. The IPO also offers a free IP Equip e-learning tool which covers the basics of copyright, designs, trademarks and patents.

 

Understanding your IP also helps reduce exposure to business risk, and it’s strongly recommended that businesses undertake comprehensive IP searches at the outset.  This will help identify potential infringement issues with third parties’ IP at an early stage. A search for registered rights (patent, trade mark or registered design) can help with this process.

 

There can be nothing more satisfying than developing a new product. Taking an idea from vision into reality is a rewarding journey, and any entrepreneur will testify that there is nothing more exciting than holding your product in your hands for the very first time, knowing you created it, that it is your brainchild, and it is completely yours.

 

Yet, this can only be guaranteed by protecting your IP.

 

As a result of this, for any business, whether pandemic-birthed, still on the vision board, or already established, registering IP must be a priority.

 

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Rachel Jones is CEO of SnapDragon Monitoring

 

You can get in touch with the IPO’s business engagement team by emailing business.engagement@ipo.gov.uk.  The IPO also publishes a list of its upcoming business events on GOV.UK at www.gov.uk/government/publications/business-events/business-events

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com