Intellectual property / Copyright
Your cormpany’s intellectual property, including patents, trade secrets, or even employee know-how, can be more important than its physical properties.
Copyright infringement can cost a small business a lot, even if it is unintentional. Trademarks, Copyright, patents, and trade secrets are also examples of intellectual property. Violations may result in hefty fines and even felony charges and prison time.
Avoiding intellectual property infringement is a process of vigilance and observing best practices when using third-party content.
Copyright Infringements & Intellectual Property
When it comes to handling a company, intellectual property (IP) rights are not often at the top of the priority list. They are, however, a serious issue, and failure to comply with them can result in financial consequences for the business, whether the infringement was deliberate or not. An infringement of intellectual property could lead to an expensive lawsuit against your corporation. Understanding what kinds of intellectual property exist and how they are covered by statute is important for not inadvertently infringing on someone else’s interests.
Types of Intellectual property rights:
Intellectual property rights come in a variety of forms. It can be impossible to prevent intellectual property theft if you don’t know what rights are applicable. Identifying the different forms of intellectual property is the first step toward avoiding the unfair use of the content.
According to Armstrong, the following are the main types of intellectual property rights that can be encountered:
- Copyrights: Copyrights safeguard the rights to “original literary works,” such as fiction, drama, poetry, animation, design, and computer applications.
- Trademarks: Trademarks cover branding elements such as terms, expressions, and images that distinguish products, services, and businesses.
- Patents: Patents cover innovations and safeguard the rights to the product for a set period of time. Utility patents, concept patents, and plant patents are examples of these.
- Trade secrets: Trade secrets safeguard confidential knowledge such as recipes, programmes, and records. Trade secrets provide one side with a financial advantage over rival interests.
Understanding these categories of intellectual property, how they vary, and the content on which they can refer will make it easier to identify protected material. You can never use content that may be covered by any of these categories without the owner’s prior permission.
The consequences of intellectual property infringement
Failure to uphold intellectual property rights may have serious implications for companies, including financial and reputational damage. IP rights breaches, if left unchecked, can also result in felony charges and jail sentences.
The possible effects of intellectual property violations can be serious, depending on the extent of the infringement, sanctions can include punitive damages in the form of monetary damages and missed earnings, an order to avoid the breach, reimbursement of the infringer’s lawyers’ fees, and criminal charges with jail time.
Willful and repetitive IP violations can result in the failure of a company and the incarceration of the violators. Accidental breaches are often expensive, exposing a company to litigation and reputational damage.
How to Avoid Intellectual Property Infringement
Given the high cost of infringing on intellectual property rights, it’s important to take the requisite precautions to ensure that your company isn’t inadvertently utilising protected material.
Freund encourages small companies to start by searching the United States Patent and Trademark Office website to ensure that a brand or product name, logo, or concept has not already been licenced. Furthermore, he urged company owners to take the following measures to avoid unintentionally infringing on the intellectual property rights of another person or corporation:
Create your own pictures or songs for commercials.
Businesses may use in-house employees or freelancers to produce exclusive graphics, content, music, and other marketing materials. When dealing with freelancers, though, it’s vital to have a clause in the contract specifying that all rights to produced content belong to the firm. Otherwise, freelancers might file the content themselves and sue the corporation for intellectual property violations.
Obtain the required licences from the relevant copyright holders.
If you want to use registered material, you must acquire the required licences as well as the express, written consent of the content’s owners. You should never start accessing covered content until you have a licence and permission.
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Make use of royalty-free Media.
Royalty-free media is often accessible online and is not subject to the same limitations as other forms of intellectual property. Royalty-free media should be used openly without fear of repercussions, but it is best to practise to give credit to the author anywhere their work is used.
Finally, if you’re unsure whether you’re infringing on intellectual property rights, it’s a good idea to check with a lawyer just to be safe. It’s never a smart idea to leave intellectual property problems to chance; the gamble isn’t worth it.
