What kinds of intellectual property can be protected?
There are four main kinds of intellectual property which can be protected:
- inventions such as new products and processes
- decorative designs, and designs for the appearance or shape of a product
- names and symbols for your product or service - trade marks
- original written publications, recordings and other material such as websites, plans and blueprints, parts lists, catalogues, promotional literature, manuals, works of art, photos and other images and formats and layouts for publications such as newsletters, webpages or other material
In some cases, the protection is automatic - for example, new text and images are automatically covered by copyright. Other forms of protection - such as patents for inventions - require you to complete an application process (and pay fees).
Another type of intellectual property is 'database right' in a database. Nationals and residents of EU member states (including businesses with a registered office or principal place of business in the EU) who own database rights can stop someone extracting or reusing any substantial part of their database, provided they have made a substantial investment (whether financial, human or technical) in obtaining, verifying or presenting the data in it.
A database is a collection of material arranged so each item is individually accessible, whether on paper or in electronic form. It includes customer lists, directories, encyclopaedias and card index systems.
Make sure you differentiate between ownership of database rights and ownership of the contents of the database. For example, if the contents of your database are someone else's copyright, you need their permission to include them.
You do not have to register your database rights. They apply automatically.
Database rights last 15 years from either the date of recording the database or the date of publishing it.
Another, often unrecognised, form of intellectual property is confidential information and trade secrets - for example, information about your customers, products or services, pricing or sales and business strategies that you do not want your rivals (or anyone else) to know about. You need rules for identifying which information is confidential, and regulate when it needs to be marked as such, how it is kept securely, which employees are allowed access to it, who they are allowed to disclose it to (and in what circumstances), and how you make sure that all your employees know about these rules. If outsiders, such as contractors, could come across your confidential information in the course of their work, make sure they sign confidentiality agreements right at the outset, that make sure they are legally bound to keep it secret.
Related Resources
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