Your company’s name,
logo and even your products belong, well, to your company. In a perfect world,
that’s how things would remain. These are all forms of intellectual property –
you own the rights to that property (intellectual property rights). However, this is far from a perfect world. A
quick look at the number of lawsuits revolving around IPR should highlight just
how easily one company can infringe on another’s rights, even unintentionally.
It also seems to make sense that if you have rights to intellectual property,
you should fight for those rights. Is that always the case? Actually, there are
quite a few pros and cons here.
Intellectual Property
Rights Pros
There are quite a few
pros to protecting your rights in terms of intellectual property. For instance,
patents, trademarks and copyrights all give your business
important advantages and incentives. Trademarks allow you to build your brand
and create a stronger company. That applies to every other company out there,
as well. Copyright ensures that a creator continues to own his or her artistic
creation (books, artwork, graphic design work, etc.). Patents foster invention and innovation, as well as encouraging
inventors to fully explain what’s being invented and how it works.
Intellectual Property
Rights Cons
While there are plenty
of pros in favor of protecting your rights, there are a few drawbacks here as
well. For instance, copyright can be given to works that truly don’t deserve
protection under the law, and patents can be given to frivolous things
(Amazon’s patenting of “pictures on a white background” is a perfect example of
patent frivolity). Other cons involve costs – protecting your rights can be
very expensive. Intellectual property rights lawyers (IPR lawyers), court costs, settlement
fees, filing fees and numerous other costs can mount very quickly, making
protection of intellectual property rights expensive for even very large
companies.
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