Nowadays, many of the greatest assets of businesses are intangible. Be it a logo, an idea or confidential information, it is essential to be up-to-date on how to keep your intellectual property safe. To learn about protecting your intellectual property (IP), read the following summary of the article written by Simon Ewing for RealBusiness.co.uk
Keeping IP safe
There’s no nice way to put it. Even if you have the most sophisticated protection out there, you’ll have a hard time preventing others from using your IP in breach of your rights.
Once your copyrighted materials and your branding are online, you can easily become the victim of copyright infringement and others plagiarising your work. The only way to tackle this problem is registering a trademark and putting a copyright notice on all relevant materials, because security systems can do little to help you out here.
If your IP continues to be abused, you can reach out to the Patents County Court for help if someone abuses your IP with a misleading domain name then you can usually action their removal from the domain without having to go to Court.
Protecting confidential data
It may be difficult to guard against breaches targeting confidential information, but the best method to defend is by being proactive and prepared to take immediate action as soon as the breach has been detected.
From a legal perspective, adequate cyber security may not only be a “good-to-have” feature, but in fact a legal requirement, if your business handles sensitive customer data, such as personal information.
If personal information does happen to leak out, you may receive a letter from the Information Commissioner and ultimately get fined. Not to mention that your clients and customers will be furious. And this may damage your business and its reputation. You need to be on top of your duties when it comes to data protection and if you’re handling particularly sensitive personal information, you need to consider whether you should apply more thorough security measures to be on the safe side.
You must keep in mind that in some cases your security systems will not protect you and you need to be proactive and be prepared to enforce your rights in connection with intellectual property and confidential information when necessary.