When you create a strong brand name and offer a standout product or service, copycat businesses are likely to emerge. These imitators can dilute your brand’s reputation, crowd your search engine results, and drive up your advertising costs. In this article, we cover how to take steps to protect your brand and intellectual property.
How to protect your intellectual property
Your intellectual property is central to your business, so it’s best to get your intellectual property registered to discourage copycats and to allow you to have a stronger case if you want to stop them.
Protecting your brand
For your business’ brand, that would mean registering your business name and trademark. Registering your business name is a legal requirement to trade under that name, but registering a trade mark gives you a right to use that name and enforce and power to stop others from copying it. For more information, see more in our article on picking a name and trade mark for your brand.
Registering a trade mark is one of the most cost-effective ways to protect your brand, and it can even help protect your products and services too. This is because for most start ups, the costs and barriers to registering a patent and sometimes a design can be challenging. However, if you build a strong brand reputation and people associate your quality product with your brand, they will still choose your branded product above copycat competitors.
Protecting your product or design
If your business relies on an invention of yours, consider registering a patent. This can be software, hardware, or a certain way of making a product, among others. They must be novel, useful to an industry, and unique from existing products. For example, if you run a fashion brand and have unique fabric you invented, the fabric’s composition or method of weaving may be patented, depending on its novelness, usefulness, and uniqueness.
You can also register commercial designs. Registering a design means protecting the visual appearance of your product. This does not include things like a specific physical feature of your product, the material you use, or the way it works. For example, your fashion brand sells a specific dress, which you can register as a design, but you can’t specifically patent the sleeves.
How to protect your intellectual property
If you have your intellectual property registered, you can enforce your exclusive right against others who copy it.
If you’ve identified someone who is copying your intellectual property, you can consult a lawyer to help you draft a letter of demand. This should tell the other party:
- What intellectual property you own,
- What rights you have over it,
- How they are infringing upon those rights, and
- A deadline for them to respond.
If the other party still persists, you might take legal action against them. This involves proving to a court that the other party has infringed on your rights, and that you should be compensated for it. The court may order the other party to stop using your intellectual property or pay you damages.
What next?
Protecting your intellectual property can save you money, time, and your business. Registering your intellectual property enables you to deter people from copying your business or enforce your rights against them. For help with your intellectual property, contact us for a free, no-obligation chat.
