The sale price of your company increases or decreases with your intellectual property value. This is the price someone would pay specifically for your intellectual property. What is Intellectual Property? Intellectual property (IP) is one realm of property. It includes copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, and sometimes goodwill. We’ve covered copyrights and trademarks in […]
Registered Copyright: Cheat Sheet for Registration
A Registered Copyright is a valuable piece of intellectual property. What is a Copyright? A copyright is a legal device that gives the holder the right to decide how, who, and when the copyrighted content is used. There are two types of copyright: common law and registered. The common law copyright is automatic. That […]
Should I File an Intent to Use Trademark Application?
As mentioned in our Trademarks Part 2 blog, the US Patent and Trademark Office has two general types of domestic trademark applications. These are the 1(a) and 1(b) applications. A 1(b) trademark application is an Intent to Use (ITU) application. This means that you have not yet started using the proposed mark in commerce, but you have […]
Trademarks – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series (Trademarks – Part 1), we introduced trademarks and how they work, in general. In Part 2, we’re going to discuss the registration process. So if you’re already in business and profiting from your name and mark, then why register? Because registration creates a presumption that you were the first […]
Google Plus Intellectual Property Rights
Using social media is a norm for businesses in today’s world. Those who fully embrace social media find the necessity to embrace Google+ as well. The search engine giant holds a lot of power over us, so Google+ would appear as a necessity regardless of if we like the platform or not. When working in […]
Twitter Intellectual Property Rights
Social media is a prevalent part of our society. It is incorporated into both our personal and business lives, but do you know what happens with your intellectual property once you’ve posted something. We’ve already provided a blog on the January 1, 2015 changes to the Facebook terms and conditions, so let’s explore how Twitter […]
Jan 2015 Facebook Intellectual Property Changes
On January 1, 2015, Facebook updated its terms and conditions. Specifically, there were some changes regarding your intellectual property rights. The key portion reads as follows: For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: […]
Intellectual Property as an Independent Contractor
Frequently, independent contractors are hired to create content for companies, but who owns this intellectual property that is created by the independent contractor? This content can be photos, written content, computer code, videos and anything creative. Typically, you would look to the contract to specify who has the ownership of the copyright. The contract would […]
Work Made for Hire as an Independent Contractor
By default, a copyright ownership belongs to the author or authors of the content; however, there are a multitude of exceptions to this general rule. One of these exceptions is the “work made for hire” exception, which would allow the person or company that hired the independent contractor to automatically own the copyrighted material. This […]
Proactive Protection – Daniel’s Trademark Story
Most entrepreneurs fight this battle more often than most any other battle in their startup experience: what must be given up in order to preserve the cash flow? Although frequently this battle is waged in many other fields, in this particular case, the battle was between legal protection and cash flow. Daniel had an amazing […]