Protecting Creations And Personal Injury Risk

Whether you are starting up an early-stage company or have been a business owner for quite some time, it is continually important to protect your innovations and ideas. Growing your revenue and maintaining meaningful profits are likely at the forefront of your goals. Along with this success, you must safeguard your intellectual property so that nothing jeopardizes the future. Consumers have a myriad of choices to pick from nowadays with newly developed technologies, requiring companies to consistently keep up with the changing times. Due to competitive challenges that seem to never go away, it is essential to protect your innovations from financial loss and injury risk.

Intellectual Property

There are four categories of intellectual property, including a trademark, patent, trade secret, and copyright. In some cases, shapes, sounds, or colors could be considered under intellectual property as well. Firstly, a trademark is a symbol, logo, name, slogan, or tagline that is utilized to distinguish goods or services from another. Secondly, a patent is a right provided by the federal government to owners of patents that allow them to exclude others from using, making, or selling a creation for a set time period. Furthermore, a trade secret is a strictly confidential set of proprietary information, such as a technique, formula, program, method, or process, in which efforts have been made to maintain secrecy due to its economic value. Lastly, a copyright is a grant to the owner that they can exclusively publish, print, reproduce, display, license, record, film, or perform their artistic, musical, or literary content and release derivative works based on the copyrighted material. All of these examples are intellectual property that is worth protecting. 

Personal Injury Risks

If you have received approval for a patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret and someone else is using it without authorization, you can enforce your rights. Typically, a cease and desist demand letter is the initial step towards holding the offender accountable. As our friends at Cohen & Cohen explain further, sometimes an infringement of intellectual property causes an individual or company to endure personal injury loss. If that happens, legal recourse is available so that the misuse of a creation is halted immediately and fair restitution is provided to the affected party. Some situations of infringement are minor and a resolution can be found quickly. But in other cases, it may require more intervention than simply cease and desist letter. Business owners that have experienced loss due to unapproved use of their intellectual property can attest to just how frustrating and upsetting it can be, so every step possible must be taken with support from a personal injury lawyer to safeguard creations or ideas. 

Regardless of how long you have been in business, the risk of someone stealing or copying your intellectual property is ever present. By taking precautions from the start and regularly assessing your personal injury risk, you are putting yourself in the position to achieve your success and keep profits flowing. Don’t jeopardize the future of your business by forgetting to routinely update your intellectual property protections.