Andrew Cooper, a top attorney in his field and the Legal Coordinator and Head of Patent Acquisitions for Meta, shares several of the most essential and actionable tips for protecting your intellectual property rights, no matter what size business you own or work for.Hear Andrew's full interview in Episode 470 of The Action Catalyst.
How do I go about best practices in securing my intellectual property rights? A few pointers, a few strategies for small and medium-sized businesses. First, conduct audits. Regularly review and document the IP assets that are available to you. And talk about patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, even designs, right?
So patents come in utility and design flavors, designs how something looks. So talk to your team, again, within the context of an open system, bring people together, regional white boarding sessions, actually going to folks who you know within your organization that have great ideas and say, hey, we want to just sit down and put some of these ideas on paper.
That's the first step in going about securing those rights that you're looking to secure. And do it regularly. Like if it's quarterly or yearly, that kind of thing. And keep a book. Sometimes in the old days when I started practicing law, people would ask, hey, where's your IP book? Where's your patent book? And it's just a record of those ideas that have been captured.
The second thing is to register your intellectual property. Now, there's some IP that you have protection from the minute that it's created. So copyright, for example, you create a story. Say you're a content company and you have story writers. The minute that they put pen to paper and they create that story, there is copyright protection. But there are other ways of registering that IP.
You can register a copyright once a work is completed with the Copyright Office. You can file a patent application to protect an invention. These are things that you should do because they create enhanced protections for you. Sometimes they are notice protections that puts the world on notice that you are the owner of this thing. And sometimes they're enhanced damages protections.
So if someone does steal your IP or copies your work, you are able to get sometimes three times the amount of damages as a result of you just registering your intellectual property. Thirdly, I really encourage small businesses to engage in NDA practice, and that's non-disclosure agreements. Create a standard non-disclosure agreement and use it routinely.
Put NDA provisions in your employee agreements when they onboard. And ensure that they are, they're time bound and they're reasonable. They relate to the work that the person is doing. And that's just with employees, but also with vendors. I should also say, when you have vendors, they're coming onto your property.
Make sure vendors have NDAs because, you know, your vendors walking through, they, you know, people might have confidential information sitting on tables or desks. And it's very easy these days to just snap a picture. with your cell phone of confidential information. So make sure that your NDAs are in place and are protecting your information in that way. Monitor and enforce your IP rights.
An IP right is no good if it is not protected and enforced. So if you have copyrights, ensure that you are sending cease and desist letters when you believe someone is infringing, that you are engaging with competent counsel that can negotiate either the takedown of things that are infringing.
Ensure that you are looking and policing because what ends up happening is there's a theory in the law that if you don't protect your rights, you lose your rights. So if you, for example, know that someone is infringing your trademark and you don't do anything to enforce it, well, if you go for a sufficient period of time without doing it, you may lose some protections.
So really look at monitoring enforcement programs. The last two things I would say, one, educate your employees.
So training employees on the importance of IP and best practices in protecting it can go a really long way to ensuring that you have a strong brand in the minds of consumers and that you're also keeping the value high on your products and your confidential information, your data, your systems. We at UPS, when I was working there, had routine trainings on this stuff.
It also goes a long way in just ensuring that people know when they have created something that's worthy of protection. And I've seen this many times. You've got people out in the field. They're working in an operating environment, a warehouse or a factory or something. They come up with some fix to a problem that is just a practical fix because they are necessities, the mother of all inventions.
They have created a unique, efficient way of doing it. And nobody knows about it except two or three managers inside that factory. And it could be a solution that every factory could use and create economies of scale. And we just don't know about it because employees aren't educated in who to contact when they come up with something that's good like that.
And I guess the last thing I would say is implement security measures. Use technical measures like encryption and access controls to safeguard your IP and your data. This is really important when it comes to trade secrets, because trade secrets, if they're not protected, they can be lost. Typically, if you lose a trade secret, the
damages are so incalculable they can't be they really can't be recovered because the idea is only a few people know the trade secret and if more people know the secret then it's really it's invaluable anymore you know the ultimate trade secret many people think about is like the coca-cola formula for coca-cola right at ups we also had um we had a system called orion it's the reason ups package cars only turn make right turns it so it's there's there are uh wait are you allowed to talk about that did you sign an nda
No, I cannot tell you why. But there's really important safeguards that you can put in place to protect that kind of stuff. Creating processes that block access to things that are critical to the organization are important for the value of the IP itself and your ability to recover if anything happens as a result.