Avoiding intellectual property violations is a matter of due diligence and best practices around the use of third-party content. Copyright infringement may harm primarily the reputation of your business, as well as cause significant losses and even lead to criminal charges.
These are the major types of IP protections one might encounter:
- Copyrights: Copyrights protect the rights to "original artistic works," including literature, drama, music, video, architecture and computer software.
- Trademarks:Trademarks protect aspects of branding like words, phrases, and symbols that identify goods, services, and companies.
- Patents:Patents cover inventions and protect the rights to that innovation for a predetermined amount of time. These include utility patents, design patents and plant patents.
- Trade secrets:Trade secrets protect information of a proprietary nature, including formulas, programs and data.
It's necessary for business owners to take the following steps in order to avoid accidentally violating another person or business's IP rights:
- Create original images or music in advertisements. Businesses can use in-house staff or freelancers to create original graphics, content, music and more for their marketing materials. When using freelancers, however, it's important to include a clause in the contract that states all rights to created material belong to the business. Otherwise, freelancers could conceivably register the material themselves and sue the business for IP infringement.
- Obtain the appropriate licenses from copyright holders. If you do plan on using registered material, it's important to obtain the appropriate licenses and explicit, written consent from the owners of the content. Without license and consent, you should never consider using protected content.
- Use royalty-free media. Royalty-free media is often available online and not subject to the same restrictions as other types of IP. Royalty-free media can generally be used freely without reprisal, though it is best practice to give credit to the creator wherever their content is used.
