Andrew Cooper, a top attorney in his field and the Legal Coordinator and Head of Patent Acquisitions for Meta, shares several of the most essential and actionable tips for protecting your intellectual property rights, no matter what size business you own or work for.Hear Andrew's full interview in Episode 470 of The Action Catalyst.
Full Episode
How do I go about best practices in securing my intellectual property rights? A few pointers, a few strategies for small and medium-sized businesses. First, conduct audits. Regularly review and document the IP assets that are available to you. And talk about patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, even designs, right?
So patents come in utility and design flavors, designs how something looks. So talk to your team, again, within the context of an open system, bring people together, regional white boarding sessions, actually going to folks who you know within your organization that have great ideas and say, hey, we want to just sit down and put some of these ideas on paper.
That's the first step in going about securing those rights that you're looking to secure. And do it regularly. Like if it's quarterly or yearly, that kind of thing. And keep a book. Sometimes in the old days when I started practicing law, people would ask, hey, where's your IP book? Where's your patent book? And it's just a record of those ideas that have been captured.
The second thing is to register your intellectual property. Now, there's some IP that you have protection from the minute that it's created. So copyright, for example, you create a story. Say you're a content company and you have story writers. The minute that they put pen to paper and they create that story, there is copyright protection. But there are other ways of registering that IP.
You can register a copyright once a work is completed with the Copyright Office. You can file a patent application to protect an invention. These are things that you should do because they create enhanced protections for you. Sometimes they are notice protections that puts the world on notice that you are the owner of this thing. And sometimes they're enhanced damages protections.
So if someone does steal your IP or copies your work, you are able to get sometimes three times the amount of damages as a result of you just registering your intellectual property. Thirdly, I really encourage small businesses to engage in NDA practice, and that's non-disclosure agreements. Create a standard non-disclosure agreement and use it routinely.
Put NDA provisions in your employee agreements when they onboard. And ensure that they are, they're time bound and they're reasonable. They relate to the work that the person is doing. And that's just with employees, but also with vendors. I should also say, when you have vendors, they're coming onto your property.
Make sure vendors have NDAs because, you know, your vendors walking through, they, you know, people might have confidential information sitting on tables or desks. And it's very easy these days to just snap a picture. with your cell phone of confidential information. So make sure that your NDAs are in place and are protecting your information in that way. Monitor and enforce your IP rights.
An IP right is no good if it is not protected and enforced. So if you have copyrights, ensure that you are sending cease and desist letters when you believe someone is infringing, that you are engaging with competent counsel that can negotiate either the takedown of things that are infringing.
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