|
Protecting Your Company's Assets
(Copyrights/Trademarks/Patents)
Your business is successful, things are going well, and suddenly someone has stolen your idea and your business is plummeting. Is this a bad dream? Let's hope not! However, many business owners concentrate so much effort into their day-to-day operations that they fail to take reasonable measures to protect their company's valuable assets and intellectual property. There are three basic ways to protect your intellectual property. These are Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents. The
basic purpose of copyrights are to protect written
works. |
Basic Copyrighting can be done by simply putting
a copyright notice on your printed materials (CD, manuals,
etc) and as a literal embedded in your executables (software).
It should look like: Copyrights can also be filed at the federal level. These registrations are done through the U.S. Copyright Office at www.copyright.gov (202)707-3000. Detailed information on copyrights and enforcement can be found in a book at the library: Fishman, Stephen. The Copyright Handbook : How to Protect & Use Written Works / by Attorney Stephen Fishman. |
Trademark forms at the state level
can be found at www.dos.state.fl.us/doc/cor_t.html
Trademarks at the Federal level can be found at www.uspto.gov (800)786-9199. |
| U.S. Patent information can be found at www.uspto.gov (800)786-9199. Other countries have their own patent processes and systems. To get patent protection outside the U.S., you can either seek a patent in the individual countries you wish to gain protection, or you can file an international application to gain protection in countries that honor the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT). More information on PCT processes can be found at www.wipo.int. Patent requests filed under the PCT can be searched at www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/search-adv.jsp. Patent databases for various other countries can be found at: www.wipo.int/ipdl/en/resources/links.jsp |
| www.FreePatentsOnline.com is a site that also lets you perform patent searches and contains a number of features such as word stemming, proximity searches and search term weighting (see www.freepatentsonline.com/help/item/Search-Tutorial.html). It also provides PDF downloading of patents and lets you set up alerts. |
| Google Patent Search at www.google.com/patents is another search tool available to you. |
| Patent Monkey Patent Search at www.patentmonkey.com |
| View our quick reference guide to Intellectual Property. |
 |
||
 SCORE
is a Resource Partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration |
||
SCORE
Naples Office Hours: Mon-Fri 9am-noon |