Property Rights

Patents:

  • Patentable inventions are New and Not obvious and solve a technical problem
  • With patents, you can exclude other from making, using, selling or importing your invention
  • The Intellectual property office (IPO) grants rights (patents) for novel inventions
  • 20 years legal protection
  • Expensive/complicated to obtain

You can use patents to:

  • Add value to your business
  • Enhance your brand image
  • Negotiate financing

Patents have some disadvantages though:

  • Time consuming to obtain
  • Designs become publicly available
  • Patents are often not that effective as patents are copied via legal loopholes
  • Costly to obtain
  • Need renewing every 4 years and time limited to 20 years

Examples: Apple vs Samsung, Dyson vs Hoover



  • Copyright is a legal right that protects the use of your work once your idea has been physically expressed
  • The current copyright legislation in the UK is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, provides cover for most works 70 years after the death of the creator
  • Copyright law lays out a framework of rules around how work can be used
  • It sets out the rights of the owner, as well as the responsibilities of other people who want to use the work
  • It allows management of permission for others to use work

For your work to be protected by copyright law it needs to be original and tangible:

  • Original: The work must be a product of your own skill or intellectual creation, should not replicate someone else's work
  • Tangible: This means it can't be an idea you had, it needs to be expressed in a physical form

Examples of copyright items: Books, photos, drama, music, film, TV, software



Design rights:

  • Design rights provide legal protection for designers to stop unauthorised copying for ten years
  • They cover appearance, not how the product works
  • Design rights exist independently of copyright
  • Registration is not required, but ownership is hard to prove in a dispute
  • Automatic protection for 15 years from the date of creation, even when a registered design is not applied for
  • To prove you own design rights it's a good idea to keep original designs and modifications to prove you were the original designer of the design
  • Using copyright, watermarks make it easier to assert ownership

Examples of design rights items: Drawings, CAD designs, 2D designs

  • There are two types of design protection that exist.
  • These are: Registered Design Protection and Design Right Protection.
  • A registered design right gives you complete control over the design, whereas an unregistered right only gives you the ability to prevent others from copying your design.



Trademarks:

  • Trademarks give legal protection for brand identity and facilitate marketing
  • A recognisable combination of words, sounds, colours and logos is important for companies
  • A logo is a graphical symbol; it needs to be instantly identifiable and unique in order to stand out
  • A trademark may incorporate graphics, but can be a word or phrase such as 'dual cyclone'
  • Trademarks are registered by making an application and paying a fee to the IPO
  • Trademarks need to be renewed every ten years
  • The ® symbol is used to warn others that it is protected by trademark

*Logos are covered by Trademark



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