How to Protect your Intellectual Property Rights or Assets?
The good old handshake for deal days are far behind us for the times of contingencies have showed how crucial a role written agreements play for acquisition and protection of intellectual assets and intellectual property. These intellectual property agreements should be set in the first place from the nascent stage of development itself of your intellectual assets and every company should also have for every step, a licensing strategy for development of intellectual property. Being bound by law under these written contracts given the enforce-ability of these by law, giving us all the more reasons for intellectual property agreements. One can have intellectual property agreements for a number of scenarios like for protection of intellectual assets from third parties or agreements written by employees.
Intellectual property agreements for protection from third parties
Once companies have a profitable intellectual property in place, companies wish to sell it to third parties to make reap on their hard work for developing intellectual assets. However, for sharing this, they license their inventions to lay down basic agreement terms and conditions in the interest of protecting their intellectual property. To whip an intellectual property agreement, companies need to ascertain their standing and stage in the process with respect to the third party.
Protecting Intellectual Property Created by Employees
When you’re looking to sign an intellectual property agreement, your company may have sensitive intellectual assets or intellectual property which is not yet public. Or there may be research and development on your intellectual property that may need to be safeguarded as they may have the potential to develop into various types of intellectual assets.
7 ways to ace protecting intellectual property
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Setting up strong Non-Disclosure Agreements in place
To avoid anything from going haywire, a non-disclosure agreement is a must for the protection of your intellectual assets. To be able to draft a well-written NDA, you should definitely take help from some expert on the matter. For the same reasons, other agreements like the confidentiality agreement, employment agreement, patents or licence, etc. should be heeded to safeguard your intellectual property. And one must get help for necessary. Get assistance with creating well-written non-disclosure agreements.
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Work in hushed tones undertones
When people come up with new, brilliant innovations, they often look to safeguard their hard work put into it by filing for patents or attempting to obtain copyrights over their intellectual assets and intellectual property. They may even wish to protect the techniques or the requirements that go into development of those proprietary important goods. If stolen, they don’t shy away from taking It to the court rooms and go to any extents to protect it. However, numerous new items have emerged recently to help companies, thanks to technological advancements and modern techniques. They involve the use of Digital Rights Management systems. These modern techniques of protecting intellectual property may be unpopular as of now, however, they greatly limit the exposure of proprietary information or goods to the world.
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Be swift, adjust quick
Invention and innovation due to the ever-growing learning technological in the IT sector has made the new ideas and innovations prone to plagiarism since ever. It is now become almost a second nature for the technological advancements to evolve to change the face of the industry in quick, huge leaps. This necessitates every participant into the industry and the market to delve into constant innovation and evolution to be able to rise to the top by catching up with the competitors. It can be metaphorically be said that you should keep up with the pace like an Olympic athlete to catch up with every cycle
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If possible, avoid joint ownership
Though it is not necessary, if possible, you should avoid joint ownership especially when it comes in terms of interests of safeguarding your intellectual property as all parties involved in the shared custody of an intellectual asset may want a piece of it and can take up even law to keep it intact. Thus, avoiding a joint ownership of sensitive intellectual property becomes all the more reason to keep at bay, all such possible contingencies for the future by hurting the interests of all the parties involved.
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Try getting exact-match domains
Getting an exact match domain may be expensive and tedious to get, causing trouble in the short-run, it has brilliant prospects to help gain a security of intellectual property for the company in the long run for trademark purposes as your name the name of the domain exactly match so there’s a reduced chance of it being copied or stolen in the future.
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Safeguard with strong control over access
Empirical evidence shows that about 81% of the breaches of safeguarding intellectual property and assets is a concoction of compromised credentials set in place for the protective purposes. It is for this reason that merely passwords are not enough and that the least a company should do is to get two factor authentication, beside making provisions to store the intellectual assets and sensitive documents in a safe place secured by identity and higher tech access management solutions.
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Publish your patent widely, being attributed to at mention
As we know, patents are the first things everyone does to safeguard their invention and innovations, people may still reverse engineer your process and devise alternate ways to it. Thus, when you apply for patent, make sure it is loud and out so that it ensures your intellectual property is recognized as yours and referred to as yours whenever mentioned.
Some other ways to safeguard your intellectual property are:
- Confidentiality clause or the non-disclosure agreements to safeguard their interests before they disclose any sensitive proprietary intellectual asset, information or trade secrets to the third party.
- Production agreements to allow the third party to enable them produce their intellectual assets into products for the market and the propagation agreements to enable the third party to propagate their products intellectual assets turned products in the market.
- Material Testing Agreements that allow the third party to conduct controlled testing of the invention made by the third party.
- Non-compete agreement is a way to safeguard a company’s interests by putting conditions on where the current employees can work in case they leave, the scope and time are constricted for new workplace
- Employment agreements are set in place to state that all the intellectual property and/or assets developed by the employees while employed at the firm using the resources of the company shall be solely owned by the company itself.
- Assignments are set in place as an additional protection to safeguard the possession of intellectual property by the company like while filing for a patent wherein the inventor should immediately conduct assignment of the intellectual property for which the patent is being filed, thus staying vigilant is the key.
- Commercial Licensing Agreements are intellectual property agreements that are set in place for letting a third party make us of the company’s intellectual assets.
Why Contract Bazaar?
We at contract Bazaar can help you with our excellent client support servicing and corresponding expert guidance help you attain all these aspects to enable you guard your interests, the best and easiest way possible as we have experts and provisions for all the above-mentioned properties and agreements as per the need of every client and every company, irrespective of the size.