1. Protect your valuable intellectual creations in order to obtain exclusive protection, or else keep them strictly confidential – you alone can decide what is the right solution for you, but it would certainly be worth consulting a professional before trumpeting your creation to the world.
2. When it comes to obtaining rights it’s not all about who can fill in the forms the quickest and mindlessly spend the most money, but rather who can create an effective complex intellectual property strategy.
3. If you haven’t decided yet whether to keep the essence of your big idea under wraps, then you definitely need to get the sharks to sign a strict non-disclosure agreement before you start regaling them with the virtues of your creation in the hope of obtaining capital investment.
4. Always carry out professional research prior to acquiring protection in order to map previous and potentially obstructing rights, because, you never know, someone may just have come up with the same bright idea before you did! In this case, you can easily find yourself in a whole heap of bother, if you start using someone else’s prior protected intellectual property rights without their permission.
5. Place your works of authorship, together with the written business concept you have developed, and your business and technical plans, which also contain your world-changing ideas, into a voluntary register of works so that it will be easier to prove at a later date that it is really yours.
6. Get design protection for your newly invented design product so that others cannot easily manufacture and distribute the same design with impunity.
7. Trademark the brand name of the product or service you have come up with so that it catches the eye of your target audience as soon as possible, they get to know about it, learn about it, come to love it and search for it again and again… – and all this can be yours and yours alone for as long as you want!
8. By all means obtain utility model or patent protection if you have really managed to come up with a novel, world-changing technical solution. But do bear in mind that it may still be better to keep everything tightly under wraps for now. You can always decide on a case-by-case basis which is the best solution.
9. If you are the head or owner of the business, make sure that your company has the rights to as many intellectual works as possible, because in this way you can increase your company’s value, reputation and market potential.
10. When it comes to acquiring rights, pay close attention to the content of the contracts you’ve concluded, just to be sure that you do actually acquire the rights you desire and that sublicensing your intellectual property rights is extensive and compensated in such a way that benefits you as well.
