Attending a Corporate Law Conference on Intellectual Property and Patent Liability
Attending a corporate law conference on intellectual property, patent liability, and intellectual property growth and limitations have benefited Ready Pac Company in a variety of ways. The session's lessons addressed intellectual property rights, torts, and product liability as they applied to our business. Any of these lessons are covered in more detail below.
Learning About Intellectual Property Rights
We learned about a variety of facets of intellectual property rights. These rights safeguard intangible goods and grant inventors and developers exclusive rights to use their inventions. One of the key issues that we learned was how to register a company, business, or domain in order to protect the company's rights. The seminar provided very crucial information on how the process of registering company with specific intellectual property rights for exclusive ownership of their creative inventions.
During the seminar, we also learnt how to differentiate between company, domains, business & trademarks to avoid creating confusion for both the public and traders. We additionally learnt the steps of registering intellectual property rights with the relevant government institution to acquire legal ownership.
Intellectual Property Development and Limitations
Regarding intellectual property development and limitations, we explored fundamental tactics of protecting intellectual property from its early stages. This is because many companies/businesses have always lost their legal rights to patent their innovative ideas/products. For instance, notifying people about innovative ideas of the company is potentially harmful or can exploit a company through unfair competition. When such happens, the particular product that the company deals in will not be considered new and cannot be prevented from further copying.
Product Liability and Protecting Brand Identity
Product liability is the heart of every business and can pose threats to a company's brand identity. It can cause potentially devastating effects to a company. During the seminar, we learned about the potential economic losses that can be a direct result of traditional news coverage, social media, and plaintiff victory that can amplify weakening once powerful brand of a product. The other lesson learned from the seminar is how to preserve hard-worn company or business reputation through provisioning of high levels of client coordinated services.
What are some of the measures that the company can take to avoid or at least minimize legal pitfalls?
The Importance of Intellectual Property Rights
Ownership of the intellectual property rights is the only recognition to receive the benefits of creative efforts. The market place is increasingly becoming aggressive, and businesses/companies need to develop a competitive edge that makes them top the rest. Therefore, intellectual property rights provide the power needed for the companies/businesses to stay ahead of others. Protection of intellectual property is therefore critical.
One of the challenges that affect companies is the loss of proprietary information, causing devastating effects on the company reputation. This can negatively affect the profits too (Hau, 2014). Some cases that involve intellectual property theft and substandard knock-offs may also present health and safety concerns to the consumers. It is, therefore, suggested that the company should use the same approach of protecting social and environmental risk to help protect the intellectual property risks in the company's supply chain. The company should take some of the steps listed below to safeguard Intellectual Property.
Safeguarding Intellectual Property
1. Adopting a management systems approach to create intellectual property protection by including executives and incorporating responsible Intellectual Property practices in the company. It is advisable to establish corporate Intellectual Property, which serves to coordinate Intellectual Property strategy of the company. The body created will also aim to meet company's specific needs (Hau, 2014).
2. The second step is to employ preventive practices and responding to violations. Multinationals can help the companies and their business partners in developing intellectual property protection through the provision of training, which shares good practices by identifying the risk factors. Intellectual property protection can promote competitive advantages, thus promising long-term buying relationships with the buyers.
3. The last step is to establish potential problems and visibility into intellectual property practices (Hau, 2014). It is important to continue monitoring the intellectual property rights among other companies for the presence of any breach.
What should we do?
Protecting Intellectual Property
After working so hard to develop the intellectual property, the property should be protected from others who want to benefit in something that they never created. Although some intellectual property rights come automatically, others need to be actively protected from theft. It is, therefore, important to register the appropriate intellectual property protection. The strongest protection comes when an individual's work is registered to discourage many from using others' inventions.
It is recommended to register company copyrights to preserve the company's rights to sue infringers and collect the damages that result. A provisional patent application can help the company to use the patent pending designation. This will discourage other companies in developing a product that will not be used for long. It's also recommended that the company register its trademark to give them legitimacy to claim their right.
Reference
Hau L. Lee (2014). How Companies Can Protect Themselves against Intellectual Property
Risk in Their Supply Chains. Retrieved on July 6, 2017 from https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-companies-can-protect-themselves-against-intellectual-property-risk-their-supply-chains
