Have you conducted an intellectual property (IP) audit in the last year? If not, now is the time to get started.
IP includes copyrights, trademarks, trade dress, patents, trade secrets and the like. In fact, it’s called intellectual property since it involves products of the mind.
An IP audit involves a systematic review of all IP you own, control, or use, including your IP assets, IP-related contracts (including employment, consulting and license agreements), IP-related policies, IP registrations, compliance procedures and other intangibles.
You’ll determine whether you actually own the IP you think you do, whether you own IP you didn’t realize you had, whether you’re properly protecting your IP rights and whether you’re fully exploiting your IP. You should, of course, try to correct any problems you find.
Without an IP audit, you may find a problem only after it’s too late to correct. For example, you may learn that the independent contractors hired by your company haven’t signed over IP rights to work they created and that they’re free to compete against you using work you paid them to create.
Perhaps you’ll discover that someone is infringing your copyrighted work but, because you didn’t register the copyright in that work, you won’t be able to recover attorneys’ fees or statutory damages.
Or, you may find that it’s too late to file for a patent on a process you developed, or that you’ve lost your trademark rights by failing to enforce quality-control contract provisions.
The audit might also reveal that you’re paying license fees for IP you no longer use or that you’re paying more for rights than you’re getting out of them.
You might even learn that you’re unintentionally infringing someone else’s IP rights. Maybe you don’t have appropriate licenses for all your software or you’re selling items using licensed IP, and the licenses have expired.
Further, your website and social media presence may include photos and other materials copied from others’ websites. Make sure you have the right to use the items; if you don’t, replace them with materials you do have the right to use.
Given the fact that there will soon be what is essentially a small-claims court for copyright claims (as we mentioned in a previous alert), it is especially important to make sure you are not infringing anyone else’s copyrights.
This is because the new Copyright Claims Board will make it more affordable for copyright owners to pursue infringements, making claims more likely to be brought, even when the copyright owner has no reasonable expectation of a large damage award.
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about how to conduct an IP audit, how to protect your IP rights, or how to correct any problems you’ve found.
Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash
