Business owners should expect a return on investment from money spent on intellectual property, but many businesses have spent hundreds of thousands on intellectual property lawyers without adding any value!

Why!?!?

Much too often, startups and small businesses receive cease & desist letters or have lawsuits filed against them for neglecting simple business practices that should have protected them...

Others waste thousands trying to protect the WRONG iP! This usually results from the 'shotgun approach' to iP protection. When intellectual property is filed for intellectual property's sake, merely hoping that anything important will be protected, it's a sure way to waste money!

The right iP to protect using intellectual property is the iP that gives your business its competitive edge!

Ownership of iP that is exclusively owned and controlled by your business should add value. It might valued by your customers. It might reduce your costs. it might improve consistency or quality of a product or service. It might establish your brand in your customers' minds.

A brand that resonates with customers should be protected by registered trademarks.

Creative expression that distinguishes a business from competitors should be protected by registered copyrights.

Innovative ideas, processes, know-how and inventions should be protected by reasonable measures to keep them as confidential trade secrets or filed as patentable inventions. 

Keeping costs reasonable, in both time and money, justifies protecting more of your company's iP. Lowering the costs for obtaining intellectual property protection provides a greater return on investment, even for some less important iP.

Paying high-priced big law fees for iP that adds modest value wastes thousands on iP that may never achieve enough value to justify those high costs.

But that doesn't mean a company shouldn't own ALL of its iP! Ownership means control. So, by all means, OWN EVERYTHING...

Why should your business PROTECT its most valuable 'intangible' property?

Iconic images like the one below brought the horrors of World War I home. 

Commanding key terrain on the battlefield is known, historically, to be the key to victory, even against a much bigger army. Whether at the battle of Thermopalie or Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg, holding the key terrain has been decisive.

Defensive barbed wire barriers have proven effective over a hundred years of warfare. Barbed wire, machine guns, mortars, and artillery barrages made mass infantry charges far too costly in lives and ineffective in warfare.

Taking time to breach a barrier of wire impedes and slows an enemy attack, allowing vigilant defenders an opportunity to effectively halt an attack without incurring significant casualties.

The Concertina® principle is a powerful metaphor comparing intellectual property protection to concertina wire. Concertina wire is a type of improved barbed wire, which is comparatively more quickly deployable and effective. Concertina wire's razor sharp bars and easily deployable coils make it far less expensive and more effective as a quick barrier against hostile incursions into a defender's key terrain.

Intellectual property, like concertina wire, should provide a quick and effective barrier, but instead of protecting key terrain, it protects against loss of your key iP. Our iPscaling training is a substantial improvement over the old way of protecting iP, which took too long and cost too much.

Ownership of ALL of your company's intangible property is the first way that your company should control its 'iP battlefield'. That's what the Entrepreneur's Guide To Owning Everything series does for you and your company and at a cost that can't be matched (even by those automated legal websites).

You don't have to identify your key iP before its even possible to know what it will be, if you just make sure that your company owns everything! The low cost of the Entrepreneur's Guide To Owning Everything training allows even a new startup to own EVERYTHING!

Now, protecting everything is not quite so easy, and won't be so inexpensive, either. There are costs to registering copyrights, trademarks and patent that just can't be avoided. 

Trademarks

Every business that plans to build a brand needs to do a trademark search. A search is absolutely necessary to make sure that your company can own its brand, and to make sure that someone else won't sue your company for infringing it's trademarked brand names, logos, slogans...

'10-minute' trademark search provides step by step instructions for conducting your trademark search. Global trademark portfolios may cost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Don't you want to make sure that you can own a trademark before wasting any money on a brand owned by someone else?

iPscaling's trademark protection training makes registering your own brand names, logos, slogans and all of your marks as affordable as possible! You'll pay only official fees of the U.S. trademark office. This makes registering your company's U.S. trademarks easier and much less expensive, which also makes it possible to register more trademarks, even before using the marks, so long as you have an intent to use the marks in the future. 

Copyrights

Almost every business needs to own copyrights in websites, marketing and sales copy, photographs, images, databases, designs, logos and much much more. If your company doesn't own it, someone else does! Does your business rely on creativity? Then, you need a work made for hire agreement and training that makes it easy to use. 

The copyright essentials work for hire agreement provides a 3-in-1 work made for hire, assignment, license agreement that should be signed by anyone creating any creative works for your company. It's an easy way to own the copyrights in every creative work.

Do your clients value your company's creative works? Do creative works give your company a competitive advantage? Then, your company should register its copyrights. Registration provides the right to sue, to seek attorneys' fees, to collect statutory damages and to claim a presumption of ownership. These rights are critical for building a hedge of protection around this key iP. 

And the fee at the Copyright Office to register a copyright is just $55. Plus, you'll save even more if you learn how to register a group of unpublished works.

Having a work registered at the copyright office tips the balance in the copyright owner's favor. So, it often won't be necessary to sue. And the step by step instructions of iPscaling's copyright essentials training make it easy and inexpensive.

Trade Secrets

If your company's key iP includes other types of innovation, like know-how, inventions, and proprietary processes, then you need a nondisclosure and iP transfer agreement. 

Protect Your Know-How (NDA+iP) gives you an easy to use one-page agreement and a customizable consulting agreement, when your company is ready to take the next step in a relationship with a contractor or vendor. 

There's no government fees for protecting trade secrets, but your company must take reasonable measures to protect its secrets BEFORE sharing its recipes. 

Patents

And if your iP includes inventions, then your company needs a freedom to operate search and patentability search. Our iP 'time machine' (patent search) training is unique. It's no more difficult than any keyword search but allows you to go backward in time and forward in time from patents and patent publications. Our time machine patent search should help you design around unexpired patents while letting you know if your invention is patentable. Do this BEFORE making a product or offering a product for sale!

If you aren't sure that your company is safe, then speak with a patent attorney and have the attorney review your search report BEFORE making or selling a product.  

Global patent portfolios cost hundreds of thousands to file and maintain. There is no easy, inexpensive or quick way to get issued patents that protect your company's inventions. If you need a patent to protect your inventions, then you need the best patent attorney you can afford.

But first you need to know if you need a patent. iPscaling's iP 'time machine' training will help you to complete a patent search that looks backward in time and forward in time from the patent publications closest to your invention.

The Concertina Principle

Building a hedge of protection around your company's most valuable intangible property should use the most cost effective intellectual property protection possible, in order to get the best return on your investment. Not everything is worth the thousands of dollars that big law charges!

The Concertina principle is a powerful metaphor that makes intellectual property easy to understand.

The purpose of intellectual property to protect a company's key intangible property (or iP) such as a company's creative expression, branding, know-how, innovation, inventions, expertise, rights in agreements, marketing, and so much more. 

Concertina wire is an improvement over barbed wire, which has proven effective as a quick and efficient barrier on the battlefield. Concertina wire comes in coils that are easily deployed and has razor sharp barbs that snag uniforms and tear at flesh of an enemy trying to breach the barrier. Stretching and stacking coils of concertina wire can be used for quickly and efficiently protecting key terrain on a battlefield.

Intellectual property is used as a barrier protecting a company's iP.

The intangible property or iP of a company creates wealth. iP makes up more than 80% of the value of the companies listed on the S&P 500! And intellectual property is necessary to protect the value in iP. Your company's iP can be lost, stolen or impaired if it is not protected from misappropriation, misuse and infringement!

Registering U.S. trademarks and copyrights and taking reasonable measures to protect trade secrets quickly and efficiently builds a hedge of protection around your company's key iP. 

A company's 'key' iP is like the key terrain on the battlefield. History shows that maintaining control over key terrain, like the high ground or a critical pass, can be decisive in a battle. 

Maintaining control over your company's key iP can be decisive, also. Key iP is the intangible property owned or controlled by a company that provides a competitive advantage or offers a substantial value to customers. It's the iP that sets your company apart, reduces the cost of providing goods or services, or increases the price that customers will pay for your products or services compared to competitors. It could affect your company's bottom line, sustainability, resilience or offers some other significant benefits by being exclusively yours.

Your key iP is worth protecting!

However, you should only protect it using intellectual property that costs less than the value your iP brings to your company! iP creates wealth ONLY if the return on our intellectual property investment is greater than the cost of that investment.

That's why you ought to look at copyright registration, trademark registration and trade secret protection! Our iPscaling training makes these types of intellectual property protection both quick and inexpensive to deploy, like concertina wire.

Now, getting patents can be important, but issued patents take longer to get and cost a lot more than these other types of intellectual property. So, patents should be reserved for important inventions that your company needs to exclusively own. Patents are more like digging tank traps or, if your company needs a global patent portfolio to protects its inventions, more like construction of the Maginot line (i.e. a French fortification that was supposed to protect France from Germany that was built after WWI)!

Patents can be effective at slowing (or at least diverting) competitors, but the cost of patents should only be justified if your inventions bring substantially more value to your company than the cost of acquiring and maintaining your patent portfolio. It's possible. Patent portfolios can be worth millions. But this is a practical strategy only for a few companies. If you need to raise substantial investment to develop key technologies essential to your company's inventive offerings, then you need to hire a patent attorney.

Otherwise, the Concertina principle establishes legal exclusivity for certain creative works, trademarked brands and innovative ideas protected as trade secrets, at a much more reasonable cost and with a much shorter timeline.

Plus, iPscaling training makes the cost of implementing the Concertina principle with copyright, trademark and trade secret protection much less expensive, providing a terrific return on your iP investment.

iPmasterclass 'all access pass'

Or Get Even More Done! 

Do you want more access for getting more done faster? Then you'll want direct access to Chris Paradies' more than two decades experience as a patent attorney and intellectual property attorney.  iPmasterclass 'one-on-one' gives you one-on-one access to Chris Paradies' two decades experience helping business owners like you via live zoom sessions.