We can help protect your ideas, inventions, designs, trademarks, copyrights, patents from being stolen by businesses and benefitting from your ideas. With our gained experience over the years, we know how to best deal with intellectual property protection and disputes. We can advise you on what the methods are best to protect your intellectual property or offer mediation between yourself and another party if a dispute arises.

What is intellectual property?

Intellectual property is a type of property that is created from the human mind. An example is a story or an invention. For businesses, it can be vitally important that you have the right type of protection for your intellectual property because it can help stop people or companies from stealing or copying your:

·         Inventions

·         Names of brands or products

·         Designs

·         Items you produce, make or write

Some of these concepts have intellectual property protection for a limited time. For artistic works like music and art, the IP protection generally lasts for the life of the artist and then 70 years after death. The purpose of IP protection is to compensate the creator for their idea/invention whilst encouraging people to come up with their own ideas/inventions to benefit society.

If you apply to one of the bullet points below, then you own intellectual property.

·         You created the intellectual property

·         You bought the intellectual property from the creator

·         You own a brand that could be a trademark

To get more information about intellectual property, please visit this website.

Making an intellectual property claim

Depending on the size of the claim, your claim could be heard at the Patents County Court if the claim is over £500,000 in damages or, if the claim is under £500,000, then the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court will handle the claim.

If your claim is under £10,000, then the ‘small claims track’ at the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court will handle the claim. For some cases, you do not have to have any legal representation, but you are encouraged to have representation to help you with legal support and increase the likelihood of winning the claim. You can trust Resolve Law Group to handle a damage claim either made by you or against you with a professional and skilful approach like we have done with previous happy clients.

Please visit the GOV.UK website to learn more about defending your intellectual property.

Types of intellectual property protection

Having good protection rights can give your business a market advantage as you would be the only business offering something different. A lot of businesses worry about the finance of IP protection, but the big costs come from global protection. By not having IP protection, it could cost your business more if others use your ideas, inventions, or materials without your consent.

Trademarks

Trademarks were created to protect branding for a business. Names, shapes, logos, sounds and more can all be trademarked. Resolve Law Group can help support you through the process by offering advice, searching for current and available trademarks so that there are no conflicts.

Copyright

Broad concepts and ideas are not protected from copyright. Copyright can only exist if the creative idea or activity is either recorded or fixed. Examples can be images, sounds, artwork and more.

Patents

Patents give the inventor of an idea or product the ability to prevent anyone from selling their invention without consent. It is important to not disclose the product before submitting a patent application as the patent can be lost if a company submits a patent before you if they have the product details.