Protect your ideas All successful businesses start with an idea and successful businesses will keep generating new ideas. Good ideas combined with judgement, initiative and most importantly perseverance are what makes a business thrive.
No business would want to give its good ideas away for free for others to use especially due to the money, time and effort that has gone into establishing a market for those ideas, products or services. Ideas are intellectual property (IPI) which means that they are property in the same way as physical, tangible assets and can be owned by an individual or by a company.
However, this ownership does need to be defined and in most cases registered so that others know what it is they cannot do without infringing your rights. Intellectual property covers a wide range of business assets, including patents, trade marks, design rights and copyright.
Samsung and Apple’s patent clash heads for trial by jury today (30 July 2012) The tech firms have accused each other of intellectual property infringement. Billions of dollars of payments could be triggered from one business to the other and sales bans imposed if the jury finds one or both parties guilty. Together the two companies account for more than half of all the world’s smartphone sales.
Despite the fact that Apple buys many of its components from Samsung, the two have failed to agree cross-licensing deals even after the courts forced their bosses to meet for talks. Whatever the outcome the lawsuits are likely to continue with other patent disputes in the pipeline. It just shows that all sizes of companies need to take the protection of new ideas very seriously.
Within the Chamber network we have a number of experts in this area and I would encourage to visit https://www.norfolkchamber.co.uk/directory to get help and advise in this area and protect your ideas.