10 Effective Ways to Protect Your Intellectual Property

 

Whenever you leave your house, you never forget to lock your doors, because the house is filled with valuable properties.

Then why not do the same for your IP assets? Why do you keep your IP assets vulnerable to IP burglary?

 

IP (intellectual property) or patents help companies to run successful businesses. Therefore, you should and must know how to protect your intellectual property.

Whether you are aware of it or not, IPs are a valuable asset and an IP theft can be detrimental, as it can lead to revenue loss and can cause harm to your business reputation.

 

Here are 10 effective ways to protect your intellectual property.

10 Effective Ways to Protect Intellectual Property

These 10 steps mentioned below are the bare minimum that you can do to keep your IPs safe.

1. Know the Type of IPs You Have

If you and your employees clearly understand what should be protected, then they can better protect it. So, the CSOs must communicate on a regular basis with the executives. They have to meet up with the CEOs and representatives from HR, marketing, and sales at least once a quarter. Each type of IP requires different protections, inventing an app and protecting its features will require different protection methods than protecting trademark files.

2. Understand Where Your Intellectual Property Is

Here’s the tricky part, to protect your IP, you focus on your core IT system and you leave unnoticed other areas like the printer, scanner, fax machines, cloud applications, file-sharing services, and employees' personal devices.

You have to monitor and ensure that the sanctioned properties are well-configured and well handled.

3. Make IPs Your Priority

Every CSO who is protecting IP should do a risk and cost-benefit analysis. Layout your company’s assets and determine what information, if lost, can harm your company, even if it’s an invention prototype. Then find out information that is more at risk of being stolen. These two things together can help you figure out where to spend your efforts.

4. Label the Valuable IPs

If the information is confidential, put a label on it or mention it. If the data is in software form, put a note on it to make sure employees are aware of this every single time they log in.

5. Secure Your IPs Both Physically and Digitally

Physical and digital both types of protection are important. Lock the drawers where the sensitive data is kept, whether it’s a data or a paper archive locker. Keep track of who has the keys. Use passwords and limit employee access to these databases.

6. Educate Employees About IP

You should host an awareness training program for company employees to prevent IP leaks. Because humans are always the weakest link in the defensive chain. In the majority of the cases, IP leaves an organization by accident or because of negligence. Make sure your employees understand how they might unintentionally expose IP.

7. Know About The Tools to Protect Intellectual Property

Today, there are a variety of software tools that are available for tracking documents and IP stores. They can locate sensitive documents and can keep track of how they are being used and by whom.

Encrypting IP will also minimize the chances of loss.

8. Think of the Big Picture

If you find someone is scanning your internal network and your detection system goes off, you call the employee who is scanning and tell them to stop doing this. Later, at night, the watchman sees the employee carrying protected documents. He/she explains this by saying “oh sorry... …It got into my bag accidentally." It is clear he/she is lying and selling a patent is their only motive.

Meanwhile, HR, the audit group, and colleagues also noticed isolated incidents, but no one put it all together and realized that it could be done by the same person.

 

This is the communication gap that can turn out to be harmful. IP protection needs connection and communication among corporates for proper functioning.

9. Always Have a Counter-Intelligence Mindset.

How will you do it if you want to spy on your own company?

You can use tactics like protecting phone lists, shredding the papers in the recycle bins, approving R&D publications, or other similar ideas to protect your IP and your business.

10. Publish it Globally

IPs like patents should be the ‘first-to-file’ according to the united inventors association- and it is the best way to protect your IP. You can publish it with reference globally. Make sure you have all the copyrights and watermarks. The more it is seen online, the more it will support your IP.

Finishing Up

It is strongly advised to individuals and companies to plan a strategy for running a business and for protecting IPs. It is the most precious asset that you may possess. Finally, businesses should always look out for how to patent an idea for an app.

 

For more information, you can visit ownmyinvention.com. We provide patent services.