How do you protect corporate intellectual property in San Diego and throughout California? What constitutes “intellectual property?”
What is Intellectual Property or IP
Intellectual Property or IP is a broad legal term referring to unique and original creations of the human mind. This includes obvious corporate work such as logos, trademarks and industrial designs, but also extends to original and copyrighted text, graphics and even video. Industrial designs extend to drawings and three dimensional representations of any item including it’s surface and composition and may extend to two dimensional drawings including lines, color and/or patterns.
If your company has developed an original process, product, song, document, website, article, video, design or graphics, software, hardware or other creation of the human mind you should register it and protect it.
How Do You Protect Corporate Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is part of the work product that your employees create. Your employment contracts and corporate policies should clearly state that your company owns any creative work which is conceived, advanced, created, completed or inspired during the course of employment.
The Watkins Firm has served the San Diego business, tech and science, real estate and medical / healthcare business communities for more than 40 years. We will help you to understand and implement the process to identify and protect corporate intellectual property and the value it brings to your company.
The identification and registration of your company’s intellectual property protects the unique information, products, processes, procedures, ideas and creative work associated with your company and it’s brand. It also forms the foundation of a substantial portion of the valuation of your corporation and your ability to expand markets and income through licensing and distribution agreements.
Did You Know Trade Secrets are Intellectual Property?
Did you know trade secrets are intellectual property? Trade secrets, when properly identified and secured, actually protect your company’s intellectual property rights on confidential, proprietary information that is often the essence of your business and its operations. This information may also be licensed for use in specific applications and markets or sold as part of a product and/or service offering.
If an employee, business partner or even company executive deceptively or access your company’s trade secrets without proper authority and authorization and use them against your corporate interests they expose themselves to lawsuits for misappropriation of trade secrets as well as unfair business practices. We can put a stop to any attempt to use this information to compete against your company’s interest and to protect corporate intellectual property and it’s value in San Diego and throughout California.
Contact an Experienced San Diego IP Attorneys
The experienced IP attorneys at the Watkins Firm can help you to identify your company’s intellectual property and how it is to be protected. We manage the entire process of researching existing copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property designations to ensure the uniqueness of your IP and our ability to defend it long term. We prepare and submit all applications and manage the process through public inquiry and comment to the point that you receive the appropriate copyright, trademark or other intellectual property protections.
Once a trademark or copyright has been obtained protecting your San Diego corporate intellectual property includes vigilantly monitoring its use and potential abuses by other companies or individuals. Are you concerned about your company’s intellectual property and its protection?
We invite you to review our podcast Episode 10 – The Importance of a Strong Corporate Attorney as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today.
