Maybe you are a Georgia business leader with a game-changing innovation, an inventor with a new product or a visual artist creating avant-garde masterpieces. No matter what your intellectual property is, of course, you want to protect it wherever it may end up. As you know, images and ideas can and do circulate online globally with incredible speed, and they stick around on the internet basically forever. Even if you think you have eliminated all of something shared on the internet, it can still pop up again several years later in unfortunate places. Intellectual property enforcement online is like a tired game of Whac-A-Mole, except your financial future is at stake.
Think outside the box
Being the first to file copyrights and patents is typically a must for securing your intellectual property, as is safeguarding trade secrets and requiring your employees to sign nondisclosure and noncompete agreements. All of this can help your intellectual property to stay where your business wants it. However, as hard as you may try to enforce protections, copies and imitations of your products are almost sure to arise eventually. That is why you may need to think outside of the box when it comes to protecting your business’s IP.
It definitely sounds counterintuitive, but one of the methods you should consider to help protect your intellectual property is to actively and widely publish it online — with attribution, of course, clear, arduous to remove the attribution. By doing this, people will easily associate the content and product with your company. This can help support your patent claim in court that the intellectual property truly belongs to you and could be the boost your case needs to win.
Legal help for today’s intellectual property complexities
No security strategy is foolproof, but a skilled Georgia business attorney can help you understand your legal options and come up with a plan to do the best effort possible to protect your intellectual property in Georgia, throughout the country and world.
