Six ways to protect your intellectual property

Six ways to protect your intellectual property

Lesson Details:
February 14, 2020

Video Transcription: Now let's talk about six ways to protect intellectual property and a lot of entrepreneurs they struggle what's the difference between a patent and a trademark when should i do NDA what is in DA's it's worth it let's talk about all that so first of all a little bit of a disclaimer I'm not a lawyer this is not legal advice for legal advice please use an attorney and keep in mind laws vary from country to country and from state to state even so you gotta use the local attorney who understands the law in your area different laws apply differently so what I'll be giving you is just a general overview but enough for you to make sense of things so let's talk about the difference between copyrights patents and trademarks copyrights are for protecting written works like books music things like that patents are for protecting inventions let's say you made a new product or a new process or a new algorithm you can protect that with a patent patents are very expensive and time-consuming it's sometimes upwards of ten thousand dollars and many many months to get a patent so it's a big decision whether you want to have that and trademarks they protect things like business names logos slogans so for example if you consider Nike that little logo that is trademarked and also the slogan just do it that's trademarked and the name Nike that's also trademarked and the picture of the logo right so all of that is trademarked so hopefully that gives you an overview now a lot of people also ask what happens will my idea get stolen is that a risk usually it's an overblown concern I can't tell you not to worry about it because every rare once in a while it happens but it almost never happens because people are too busy with their own work and even though you think your idea is good probably they don't in any way it's not the idea that matters it's your implementation of it and making it a success because everybody will copy you. Once it's successful anyway it's gonna be out there but if you're worried you should always always always work with people you can trust I know it's a gray area sometimes we think we can trust people sometimes we don't but often we have a accurate gut reaction and if you're feeling a little desperate maybe for money for help you might get into business with somebody that you don't really know if you can trust them yet and that's usually a sign for bad things to come so just keep that as a rule of thumb and always have that as one of your guiding ideas work with people you can trust now on the more practical side there are things that are called a MD a nondisclosure agreement it's an actual legal document that says that when people sign it they agree not to disclose whatever you're gonna tell them and this is for people who are outside of your company and for employees now there's a lot of debate about usefulness and application of NDA's because they waste time they're very difficult to enforce I mean you're literally gonna have to choose somebody to enforce that and it irritates some people for example I don't like when people ask me to sign an NDA investors don't like when they're asked to sign an NDA first of all they can't because sometimes they have competing companies they're helping and so do i and it's just a waste of time and I rather would focus on the business rather than the legalities of protecting the idea that I don't know I'm not even gonna steal it it's a total waste but the NDA's do protect a tiny bit of deterrence just by kind of scaring people making sure you know like letting them know hey you are under NDA so don't do anything crazy so it's a tiny bit of benefit in many cases I'd skip it but again this is not legal advice that's just my opinion and also another tool you have is a document called non-compete agreement this is for business partners or employees who work at your company and the agreement is that lets say they leave for some agreed-upon amount of time they're not going to be able to either start or get hired by a direct competitor of yours so these are the tools to protect your intellectual property.

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