The Intellectual Property Protection Guide For Startups

Step 1: Hire an Intellectual Property Lawyer

Intellectual Property law is complicated and imposes various requirements on owners to preserve, protect, and claim their rights. As a startup owner, you will need a reputable Intellectual Property Lawyer to help you devise effective strategies to manage and protect, as well as to avoid the common mistakes businesses make, which can have severe legal and financial consequences. As a business owner, one of the key lessons you must learn is that you must not hire lawyers to solve problems – you must hire them to prevent problems from happening.

Step 2: Identify Your Intellectual Property

The next step is to make a comprehensive list of every idea, invention, concept, name, logo, slogan, or business process that you think your startup owns and is unique and valuable to your business. Then, your lawyer will help you determine whether these names, ideas, inventions, concepts, and business processes qualify as potential copyrights, patents, trademarks, or trade secrets.

Step 3: Make Sure Your Startup Owns the Intellectual Property

Before applying for any of the forms of protection available in the United States or abroad, you must confirm that your company is indeed the legal owner of the Property and can legally continue to be the owner in the future. With the help of your lawyer, you should answer the following questions:

• Do your former employers own the Property if you created it while working for them?
• What happens in the event you and your co-founders break up? Who owns the Property?
• Have you given away the rights without knowing through contracts with suppliers or contractors?

Step 4: Research Your Intellectual Property

The next step is to confirm that your Intellectual Property is indeed unique, original, and is not confusingly similar to other businesses’ Intellectual Property. In other words, you need to make sure its legally protectable.

With the help of your lawyer, you must search the patent records on the USPTO’s website to see if someone has already patented your invention or something very similar to it. In addition, you should search the USPTO’s online trademark database and the internet, in general, to see if your potential business and product names are available.

Step 5: Protect Your Intellectual Property from Investors

If you are currently looking to raise money for your startup, you are likely going to be pitching your products or services to potential investors. This means you will need to disclose at least some of your Intellectual Property, which can leave you vulnerable to infringement. To avoid any loss of your Intellectual Property rights, make sure you:

• Keep records of who has access;
• Ask all potential investors to sign non-disclosure agreements and return or destroy all copies of the materials you gave them if they decide not to invest; and
• Distribute copies of your materials only to a limited number of potential investors. The fewer copies in circulation, the better.

Step 6: Protect Your Intellectual Property from Contractors and Employees

To prevent contractors and employees from stealing your valuable assets and selling them to your competitors or even using them to start their businesses – which happens more often than you would think – make sure you have them sign non-disclosure agreements. These agreements include an acknowledgment that all rights to the Intellectual Property created by them while working for your company belong to the company.

Step 7: Protect Your Intellectual Property Globally

No matter how unique or original, its protection will only apply to where you register it. If you register it in the United States, you will only obtain protection in the United States. While applying for registration in the United States is a step in the right direction, it is only the first step. All startups should have an international Intellectual Property protectionstrategy if they believe their products will eventually reach other countries.

As part of your strategy, you should consider filing an international patent application, which protects in over 100 countries for up to 18 months.

Jurado & Farshchian, P.L. can help you protect your startup’s Intellectual Property. Get in touch via WhatsApp https://wa.me/13059210440, call us at (305) 921-0440, or send us an email to [email protected] to schedule an initial consultation with one of our Intellectual Property experts.