Intellectual Property Management for Businesses
Congratulations! You’ve got your official intellectual property certificate! You are now the proud owner of a federally registered copyright/trademark/patent!
…Now what?
Now, you have to find and develop methods for managing your intellectual property. Managing your IP is probably one of the most important aspects of owning IP. This is due to the fact that other than limited import protection from Customs and Border Protection, there is no IP policing department constantly looking for infringement for all of the registered trademarks, copyrights, and patents that exist in the US. It is the job of the IP owner to manage, police and enforce their own IP rights. So what benefit is there to making sure you are managing your IP properly and efficiently and what are the options available to help you protect your IP?
Benefits to Managing and Policing Your IP
The first and most important benefit of managing and policing your IP is keeping it yours. Effectively managing your IP can aid in preventing misuse or infringement by others and avoiding abandonment by you. If IP is mismanaged or misused by others, it is possible that the owners of that IP could lose their ownership rights in it. In some cases, the IP itself may become “abandoned” and lose its protection all together. These particular consequences tend to be more of an issue in the trademark realm, but even with copyrights and patents, failure to manage or police your IP could not only allow an infringer to encroach on your rights, but also might help them get away with it in one way or another.
An effectively protected and managed collection of IP rights, or an “IP Suite” can also be a great leveraging tool in the event you wish to sell it to someone else. Profitable or well protected IP Suites are considered highly valuable intangible assets (including the value of a trademark to the “goodwill” of a company, the exploitation rights of a patent, or the potential royalty income of a copyright) and can have a large impact for a company’s bargaining position in the event it wishes to sell its IP or the company as a whole. For example, the brand value of Gillette® (which includes the trademarks, patents, copyrights and goodwill of the brand) amounted to over $15 billion when it was acquired by Procter & Gamble in 2005, which was likely a great negotiating advantage in the $57 billion merger.
IP Management Information
So (hopefully) I’ve convinced you to monitor and police your IP. Now how would you go about actually doing it? In terms of IP management on the owner’s end, there are a few simple ways an you can begin to set up management practices.
Properly marking and using your IP is the simplest way to begin the management process. For Trademarks, this means employing the techniques discussed in a previous post: Proper Trademark Use. An additional tip for trademark management is to create a management document or schedule reminders for important deadline dates like statements of continued use and renewals (or have someone like your attorney do it for you) to avoid losing protection because of something simple like failure to file a renewal notification.
For copyright owners, a similar approach may be used. Copyright Management Information (CMI), which includes the standard copyright notice (©), watermarks, artist signatures, etc., may be employed to mark your IP and alert others of your ownership rights. Though CMI is not required for copyright protection, adding CMI to your creations provides notice to would-be infringers and the removal of CMI from an infringing use of copyrighted material may prove willful infringement and allow for more substantial damages to be awarded in a lawsuit.
Digital IP Management Information
As more and more content is moved to or created for the digital sphere, it may be useful for creators and owners of IP to learn how to create and insert IP information into their digital works. One of the most effective ways to do this is to include certain ownership information in a file’s metadata.
Metadata is information embedded in a file that is used to describe or summarize basic information about the data in said file, which can make tracking and working with specific data easier. Specifically, administrative and descriptive metadata can provide information about creation, ownership, identification, key words, search tags, and other technical information. This information becomes an unseen but attached part of the file (even when it is copied, saved, downloaded, or shared) and is difficult for others to alter or remove.
Metadata can be especially useful for photographers and other creators utilizing digital media. In using this option, there are a number of helpful websites and articles that have information on ways to do this. One useful example I have found: https://www.lightstalking.com/protect-your-images-by-adding-contact-and-copyright-metadata-to-them/.
NOTE: Metadata Scrubbing
In some instances, having creation, ownership, and author information is useful, if not vitally important. In other circumstances, it may not be as beneficial. Documents created in Microsoft Office, for example, create and update metadata as a document is made and edited. In some instances, this can show information about previous versions of a document, previous users or authors of a document, or what changes have been made to the document (even if the changes are not tracked), which may or may not be what you want to show others who see it. There are ways that you can remove certain information and identifying markers from documents and also lock such information so that it cannot be changed by others.
It is also important to note that embedding metadata is not a fail-safe method of management and protection. Just as in Microsoft Office documents, there are ways to strip metadata from all sorts of digital files and some social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter actually strip certain information (or all information) from metadata on their posts. This is something to be aware of , particularly when posting content to social media.
Policing your IP
Having monitoring and management practices in place is a good step in keeping your IP safe and valuable, but if not properly policed and enforced, it may lose value or even lose protection all together.
Google Alerts
One of the quickest and easiest policing methods, which can work well for many trademarks, is to set up google alerts for your mark as well as related words and phrases. Google alerts track websites, articles, blogs and news and sends alerts to the user of mentions related to the search terms in the alert. They can tell you when and where any use of your alerted content is appearing. This can be a low maintenance way of monitoring and tracking your IP and may help you find possible infringements. One major drawback to Google alerts is that it does not track or alert solely for images and video tracking capabilities are limited. In these instances, it may be better to use an IP monitoring software or company.
IP Management Software
IP management software can be an immensely valuable investment when it comes to policing your IP. Like Google alerts, most IP management software will make scans of digital content to help monitor your IP, but as they are specifically tailored to protecting IP, they have certain features a Google alert does not. Most not only search and compare key terms and IP information on the internet generally, but target USPTO, Copyright Office, and court filings as well as publications and journals to find similarities and flag possible issues. Many also have capabilities to aid in management practices and efforts, like administration and collections for licenses and royalties, and can alert you to deadlines and send filing reminders as well, though those options may cost a bit more. For some examples of different IP management software, see the list provided at https://www.capterra.com/intellectual-property-management-software/, which contains some of the most popular options as well as some more tailored solutions.
IP Management Companies
If trusting this important task fully to a computer program isn’t your thing, don’t worry, they have people for that too! IP management companies perform similar (if not identical) services and have systems AND people in place to help monitor and alert you to possible threats. With the addition of the human element, there is opportunity for in-depth interpretation and personal guidance for you as the client as well as the ability to potentially catch a nuance or technicality that software may miss. They can get quite expensive, but if your preferences lean towards the human element or you have IP (particularly for a potentially influential patent or booming trademark) that has the potential to be infringed upon in subtle ways, it may be well worth the money.
The ways in which IP can be monitored, managed, secured, and policed are growing day by day, and as we’ve discussed, the benefits of doing so are well worth the time, effort, and expense that go into them. Proper IP Management is a necessity in today’s world and hopefully you now have some good tips to get you started!
