The biggest component of a creative entrepreneur’s life is to create intellectual property which has become a powerful asset in Branding. Intellectual Property for creative entrepreneurs is a critical asset of making money and ensuring business growth. Graphic designer’s, tailors, musicians, designers and all creative entrepreneurs are in businesss to create intellectual property. It would be a waste for them not to find out how to protect it.
Because creative people generate their works from innate talents, they tend to undervalue their works. Creative expressions may have little value but they have the potential of being powerful brand assets. Being IP savvy means recognising your creative works as a valuable business asset just as valuable as other assets in business like your factory equipment.
“Intellectual Property” refers to those expressions of ideas that can be considered “owned” by an individual or company and are therefore protectable under the law. The intent of intellectual property law is to encourage innovation by giving the creators ample time to profit from their creations and ideas and to recuperate their development costs.
The four basic forms of intellectual property protection are Copyright, Trademark, :
- Copyright – A copyright protects the specific form in which ideas are recorded, and is the form of protections used to protect literary (books, articles, poems) and artistic (cartoons, music) works. Anything you write or record, even discussion forum posts, is immediately protected under copyright law unless you specifically place it into the public domain or some other licensing agreement (e.g., Creative Commons or the user agreement of the web site on which its first posted).Most times, copyright protections some years aftert the death of the creator/author.
- Patent – Patents protect an invention that is “novel” (new and original) and “non-obvious” (to someone with technical expertise in the field of the invention). This has traditional been primarily used for physical devices (machines, electronics, certain manufactured goods), but has recently been applied to more abstract concepts, such as computer software algorithms or business processes.
- Trademark – Trademarks protect your brand, i.e. a letter, number, word, phrase, sounds, colour, smell, slogan, logo, picture, aspect of packaging design or any combination of these that significantly identifies a product as unique and therefore helps someone or a business derive economic value from it. The scope of trademark protection is usually within a specified class of industry and has a life span.
- A trade secret includes formulas, processes, practices, methods, designs, patterns or instruments a combination of these which a business or organisations use in deriving economic benefit over competitors. This kind of information are classified confidential and are not generally available to the public.
There have been several thoughts arguing against the protectionof intellectul property, what do your think?