It's World Intellectual Property Day today and Innovate are celebrating the invaluable contributions made by innovators and creators across the globe.
What is Intellectual Property?
Intellectual property (IP) rights reward artists and inventors for their works and encourage them to keep producing the songs, films, products and devices that help make our lives safer, more comfortable and more fun. They come in the form of patents (for inventions), trademarks (for brands), registered designs (protect the look of a product), and copyright (for music, art, and literature).
The broadest of these protections is copyright. Copyrights are intended to protect "original works of authorship" that are in a tangible form. For a set length of time, these works cannot be copied or reproduced without the copyright-holder's permission.
Copyrights do not protect the ideas put forth by a particular piece of art; they only protect the way in which those ideas are presented. In many countries, any original work of authorship is automatically copyrighted as soon as it is created.
Other sorts of intellectual-property protection are much narrower in scope. Trademarks protect designs and phrases that businesses use to distinguish their product from other companies' products, and trade secrets protect proprietary information that must be kept secret in order for a business to profit (the recipe for Coca-cola, for example).
Of all of the forms of intellectual-property protection, patents are the most complex and tightly regulated. Patents are basically copyrights for inventions, defined by U.S. patent law as "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." Unlike copyrights, patents protect functionality of the invention, rather than the tangible form of the invention itself. Consequently, patenting something is a much trickier procedure than copyrighting something.
When inventors come up with a new device, the first thing they should do is patent it. Patents are a government's way of giving an inventor ownership of his or her creation. For a certain period of time, patent-holders are allowed to control how their inventions are used, allowing them to reap the financial rewards of their work, in the countries that they have applied for protection in. Patents are a palpable, legally-binding manifestation of a person's genius and innovation; they allow a person to actually own an idea.
How can Innovate Design help?
We provide:
- Expert advice on Intellectual Property (IP) protection, including patenting
- Global patent searching to establish originality
- Cost effective professional product design
- Prototyping of your new product idea
- Help with Intellectual Property applications
- Product marketing advice and assistance
Benefits of using Innovate Design
- We have over 10 years experience in developing ideas
- We offer a review of your idea free of charge
- You retain 100% of the idea and therefore 100% of the profits
- All information shared is 100% confidential
- We have been acknowledged as an approved consultant provider by Business Link | London since 2002
- Our business and documentation is formulated to be compliant with BS 8538:2011 -Â what this means