Lots of companies or even people thinking of starting their own business have a lot of questions about protecting their information, their inventions, and their overall intellectual property. These are a companies client and trade secrets. Many company are made up almost wholly by this intellectual property.
What is Intellectual Property and How to Protect It
Intellectual property is your ideas, information, research and knowledge you have that make your product special. This can be you logo, your business name, a special slogan, software, an invention, special advertising, etc, anything that is your special mark.
Client and Trade Secrets are Even More Specific and Private
This is any information that may include a specific drawing, formula, program, product, process, technique or pattern that gives a business a certain advantage over others. Of course if it is to be considered a client and trade secret, then you the business owner need to do everything possible to keep it that way. That means employees need to sign contracts promising not to divulge any trade secrets to any competing company. A good example of a trade secret is the Coca Cola formula.
We at Nickels Private Investigations have just come across a great example of a violation to trade secrets law. Again a case involving Coca Cola, an administrative assistant at the company was caught on video going through documents and files looking for information she was giving to Coca Cola’s competition Pepsi. Needless to say, she was let go and charges may be brought against her.
Now that We’ve looked into trade secrets, let’s talk about Copyrights and why you might need them. Many clients ask Tom Nickels Private Investigator whether he thinks copyright procedures should be done or not. The truth is that anything that is yours in particular, a book, art, websites, magazines, plays, movies should be copyrighted.
When you get copyright protection then you, the author, get exclusive rights to economic compensation for your work. Without copyrights you have no way of protecting yourself.
To get a work or a project copyrighted you have two requirements.
1. Your project or work needs to be tangible. It needs to be written on paper, or recorded on some format.
2. It must be original and creative.
Once you have had something copyrighted then your work is completely and legally protected from being stolen or copied.
