Unregistered IP rights Services - Copyright ©, Trademark TM, DataBase rights, Designs, Trade Secrets, Know How, Domain Names, Digital Brand, Social Media
Certain IP rights can be registered to mean that your IP rights are legally acknowledged within the country where the IP right is ‘granted’. Success in this registration process confers protection and value to the IP right in question.
Developing the right intellectual property protection helps you to prevent others from stealing or copying:
- your inventions
- the name, design, look and feel of your products, websites and brands
- things you write, make or produce
Some IP rights you will register and some you will not, and this will be determined by a balanced assessment of risk, reward, competition, future growth and resources.
Unregistered IP rights are not free as such, because they require internal management to identify, protect and review these rights at frequent intervals.
In certain countries, you can hold both registered and unregistered rights for designs, trademarks and copyright.
With registered rights, you have a government authority to confirm that you have fulfilled the requirements for registration.
With unregistered rights, you need to work a bit harder to ensure you can defend your rights if challenged.
The key to good unregistered rights protection is proof. Without proof, you are ‘whistling in the wind’.
By proof, I mean evidence of use and time stamping.
I always advise clients that there is a balance between, publication, patenting and trade secrets for example. The first two strategies make your invention available to the public whereas the latter strategy keeps it closed and ‘internal’.
Most businesses have built up unregistered rights in their brand without realising it, and optimising this becomes an essential next step for protection.
We provide services for identification, development and management of unregistered IP rights:
- Designs
- Trademarks
- Copyrights
- Trade secrets
- Know-How
- Digital brand
- Social Media
- Data
