High Tech (and Low Tech) ways to Protect Intellectual Property

High Tech (and Low Tech) ways to Protect Intellectual Property and Trademarks

The law states that you must attempt to protect intellectual property in order for the law to support your property rights. Yet theft occurs, and legal action to stop the use of intellectual property must be taken promptly to control the damage. This theft can occur from someone stealing files via hacking, copying data from the laptop of a traveling employee, or walking out the door with a USB drive loaded with the data. Trademarks are yours once they are registered, but must be monitored and managed to retain full control and its rights. How then do you protect intellectual property and trademarks? 1)Verify the potential trademark is unique before using it. If you use something similar to someone else's trademark, trademark laws give you no rights if someone else infringes upon your own trademarks, logos, or brand names. 2)Trademark all logos and brand names as soon as they are decided upon. The faster the trademarks are received the sooner the law's protections come into force. 3)Stay silent on projects in work. Don't discuss it in public or it may no longer be a trade secret or patentable. 4)Shred paper documents on your intellectual property. While someone stealing these papers from the trash and using the data would still be legally prosecutable under intellectual property protection laws, making it harder to steal prevents this hassle. 5)Disable USB ports and network connections on computers that hold intellectual property. If data cannot be copied without authorization, it cannot be lost or stolen. 6)Run automated searches for key words and descriptions of technology like your own. Someone coming up with a very similar design may be the first sign of intellectual property theft. 7)Search image databases for your trademark or similar graphics. This task can be crowd-sourced or done using intelligent image search software. 8)Keep up your firewalls and anti-virus software. If data thieves can't get in, you have protected your data. 9)Never post intellectual property or sensitive information online. One employee discussing such matters online can void intellectual property. 10)Never get input from others on intellectual property in development. This is especially true if they discuss the matter on professional forums and get input from others to incorporate in the design. If others contributed to the design or product, you may lose the right to call it yours - and the right to profit exclusively from it. 11)Maintain utmost security on your data backup sources. This contains all of your intellectual property, and is often less protected than a main corporate intranet.

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