How To Protect Your Intellectual Property

Intellectual property, or IP, is defined as any sort of work or invention you create that results from your creativity. This can be written work, a physical design, art, or anything else. If it comes from your intellect, then it is your property. However, it becomes very tricky to illustrate how something is your IP unless you take steps to protect your work. There are countless examples of IPs being stolen, and the originators are unable to do anything about it. The best thing you can do is learn how to protect your intellectual property.

Keep Your Secrets

If you have something in mind that you think makes a good story, a good invention, etc, then you must keep it secret. If you go around blabbing about it, especially on social media, the likelihood is that someone else is going to take your idea and push through with it. This is going to leave you having to investigate and potentially sue. Luckily, however, there are great resources out there for IP investigation that can help you reclaim your IP. Hopefully, things will never have to reach that point for you.

Document in Detail

Say that you have an idea for an invention but don't have any sort of funding, and so you just want to draft it out. You must take these ideas and document them thoroughly. You can use something like Word on a PC (or Mac/app equivalent) and be very detailed about your plans. Make multiple copies, make sure that you're saving the timestamps to prove when you documented the data, and even mail it to yourself as proof that it was yours at that particular time and date. If your IP is ever stolen, this sort of documentation is going to make it very easy for you to win your claim.

Apply for Trademarks and Join Registered Sites

IP is incredibly important, not only on a personal level but to the world. Look at all the great inventions the world has now, and it's all thanks to people who were able to push their intellectual property as their own. To help further protect your IP, apply for trademarks with your ideas. This is a pretty easy process, and just about everything can be trademarked, as long as it doesn't conflict with an existing trademark. If you're a songwriter or write short stories, etc, you can find websites out there to publish that will automatically copyright your work because they're registered. This is a great way to protect your IP.

Push Your Investment

If at all you can, start pushing through toward fruition with your ideas. Even if you hit a snag and have to stall, you still have an actual project started, and this is going to make it much harder for someone to steal your idea. It makes sense too; if you just have a concept or some loose idea, and someone steals it, it's incredibly hard to prove that the thief stole it from you. After all, who's to say that two people can't have the same idea? Social media marketing trends, for example, can push people towards similar ideas as products and services become more popular. If you leave your ideas just sitting around, so to speak, they're very easy to steal. On the flip side of that, however, if you start putting your ideas into motion and creating with them, it's nearly impossible for a thief to get away with claiming it was their idea. You have a body of work to demonstrate that the IP is yours, even if that work isn't fully completed.

In Conclusion

It isn't hard at all to protect your intellectual property. It's just something that you must make an effort to do. A lot of people in the world believe that just because something is their idea, therefore it's legally protected and no one else can steal it. While this is technically true for a lot of different IP categories, good luck proving that a loose conceptualization you had was truly yours. The ball is in the thief's court if you do not go through and protect your intellectual property.

Sierra Powell graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a major in Mass Communications and a minor in Writing. When she's not writing, she loves to cook, sew, and go hiking with her dogs.