As lockdown restrictions continue to ease over the next few weeks, business owners will be facing the difficult task of assessing how the pandemic has affected their business and what steps they need to take to move forward.
In periods of economic uncertainty, we tend to see an upturn in contentious issues, including intellectual property infringement. It is therefore a good time for businesses to assess where they stand with their IP, ensuring they have all the necessary protections in place. Spending some time (and a little bit of money) doing this now will prevent much more significant costs further down the line if your IP is attacked.
A simple step to help you with the above is to conduct a “health check” of your business and its IP assets. We have set out some points below that could assist you in making some headway:
- Do you have tag lines, logos, or a trade name that can be protected by a trade mark registration;
- You can use https://www.gov.uk/search-for-trademark to check whether there is something that has already been registered;
- If you have a trade mark, check that the trade mark is registered in the name of the entity that you want to have ownership of your intellectual property, rather than the employee who makes the application (which tends to be the case);
- If you have had your website or content drafted by a third party have you had ownership of the content transferred to you by a legal assignment?
- Ensure that you retain the domain registrations;
- Retain all passwords and updated passwords to your social media accounts rather than leaving the control of this to an employee;
- If you have a new business idea that you are exploring with a third party it may be worth checking if the discussions can be protected by way of a Confidentiality
- Agreement or a Non-Disclosure Agreement; and
- If you use influencers or advertise using third parties on social media, ensure that you make it clear that a post is an advertisement.
These suggestions are just a starting point, but if you would like to discuss your brand protection in detail, please do not hesitate to contact Humna Nadim on 0161 838 8163 or email humnanadim@kuits.com.
