Your Ideas, Your Assets: Project Your Intellectual Property

Let’s say you found a clothing brand which goes by the name of Frozen Shirts.

- Ong Xiang Hong

In the time you’ve been running the business, your clothes are well known for their bright colours and retro style.

But recently, another clothing brand has emerged. Calling itself Freezing Shirts, its clothes are also brightly coloured and retro styled. Its logo even looks suspiciously similar to yours. Its presence is confusing your customers and even eating into your revenue. What can you do?

This is where intellectual property (IP) protection comes in. IP protection allows for companies to protect their creations from being misused by other entities.

As IP is a complex area of law with many nuances, please do not use this article as a substitute for legal advice. Always consult a lawyer before making a decision.

WHAT IS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?

Whether we notice it or not, intellectual property is all around us. Every product that we use is the result of a long chain of innovation. Take for example a pen. Laszlo Biro’s famous patent on ballpoint pens changed the way pens were made. The logo on your pen is a trademark—a form of IP which identifies the brand owner.

And this would be the case with almost any product or service in the marketplace. A smartphone for example contains hundreds of thousands of patents, each relating to a particular function. The Bluetooth module alone contains at least 30,000 patents. The smartphone brand would be protected by a trademark. And if you play music on your smartphone? That song is protected by copyright.

IP is protected by law. This enables the IP owner to earn recognition or financial benefit from what they invent or create. These laws grant IP owners time-limited rights to control how their creations can be used. IP owners may either keep these rights to themselves, or sell it for monetary value.