The Last Petson to Invent Something So It Doesnt Have to Be Invented Again

Intellectual property: It'southward yours. Own it.

From: Canadian Intellectual Holding Office

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Tabular array of contents

Create information technology
- Who should care about intellectual belongings?
- What is intellectual belongings?
- Why does intellectual holding matter?
- What does your future expect similar?
Identify information technology
- Types of intellectual property
- What you tin can exercise
- Trade secrets
Protect it
- Copyright
- Trademarks
- Patents
- Industrial designs
Make it happen
- Let CIPO assistance
- Take the offset step
- More resources

Create it

Innovation starts with an idea—your thought. You discover a problem to solve or a gap to fill. Sometimes it starts with a fleeting thought that keeps coming back, or information technology's a tug that won't let go. Then information technology starts waking y'all up at night or it just won't let you sleep. Your thought demands attention. It wants to go places, and you decide that y'all're the i to take it there. What if you too determine to treat that idea as a valuable business asset correct from the first? That's what intellectual property (IP) is all near.

Who should care about intellectual belongings?

Business owners
Entrepreneurs and innovators
Inventors
Designers
Researchers

Imagine that your next-door neighbour asked you to describe what you exercise. Would you employ any of these words? If and then, and so yous need to know near IP.

What is intellectual holding?

IP is all around us. The inventions and products that we use every day all had their beginnings as IP. IP is what you create, invent or develop as a result of your intellectual activeness. IP is valuable, and just like other types of property y'all own, it comes with legal rights.

Why does intellectual property thing?

There is no monopoly on practiced ideas. People observe new things every day. As you develop your idea into something tangible—whether that means edifice your business or designing and creating a product to industry or sell—someone else might be doing the same thing. Protecting your creation helps protect your power to reap the benefits of your hard work.

What does your future expect similar?

What if you could look 5 or 10 years into the futurity? What volition your creation look like? Will your company be a household name? Will you have a product in everyone'due south kitchen? Will you be making money from licensing agreements?

Whatsoever your goals are, use your IP rights to help you achieve them. And don't be afraid to think big. After all, information technology was your ingenuity.

Identify it

Inventing something new is a process. You lot do research. You try things. Some work, some don't. When yous invent, you learn. And you lot create IP. About every innovation has some type of IP, right from the moment you start bringing your idea to life.

Many businesses—both large and small—use their IP to introduce innovations to Canadians and bring new products into the marketplace. What if your "original creation of the mind" is next? Start giving your IP the attention it deserves.

Types of intellectual holding

IP rights protect yous every bit a creator. There are 4 main types of IP rights, and more than i might apply to your creation.

What if you wrote a song that is catching fire on Net radio? You own the copyright to that piece of work. Copyright means the sole right to produce or reproduce a work—or a substantial part of it—in any course.

What if y'all take a proper name for your new business that's clever and catchy and that describes the essence of y'all and your production? You accept created a trademark for your company. A trademark is what identifies your appurtenances or services in the public mind.

What if yous are creating a new inkless, erasable mark that works on newspaper, whiteboards and drinking glass? Information technology might exist eligible for a patent. Patents protect original inventions and can exist applied to products, processes, machines, chemical compositions and improvements to any of these.

What if y'all are developing a cool new item of wearable technology? You may exist able to protect its novel await as an industrial pattern. Industrial pattern is about how something looks. It protects the visual features of shape, configuration, blueprint or ornamentation, or any combination of these features practical to a finished article. In other words, it protects the advent of a product.

How many of these apply to you lot? Even if the answer is only 1, you have IP that you can protect.

What you can practice

Did you create an original literary or artistic work? Yous can annals your copyright. Have you lot established a business? Make sure your company name, logo or slogan doesn't infringe on someone else's trademark. Search the Canadian Trademarks Database to find out if it has already been filed or registered. Are you creating a new production or design? Make sure someone else hasn't done information technology first. Search the web, including the Canadian copyright, patents and industrial designs databases. Meanwhile, take steps to treat your innovation as a trade hugger-mugger. Identify your IP, and start putting it to work for you.

Trade secrets

A trade secret is information that gives you lot a business reward over a competitor. Trade secrets can include formulas, practices, designs, patterns, information compilations, devices or instruments. To consider something a merchandise hole-and-corner, y'all need to go along it secret.

Treating your innovation as a trade cloak-and-dagger makes the most sense at the research and development stage.

It too makes sense for innovations that could later be protected past patent or industrial design registration. Tin can your creation be opposite engineered? If non, protecting it equally a trade undercover might be an excellent strategy.

If you want to protect sensitive information equally a merchandise hugger-mugger, make sure your employees, customers, vendors and visitors know that they are forbidden to disclose or in any other style misuse your trade secrets. Have them sign confidentiality agreements if you tin.

But beware: a merchandise secret is merely a secret until someone finds out nearly it. If some other person independently invents or discovers the details of your trade secret, there is nothing to stop them from using it, applying for a patent or publishing the information.

Did you know?

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has the largest drove in Canada of current technological know-how from around the world. Patents and registered industrial designs are a fashion for people to share cutting-border data. Each document describes a new aspect of a cosmos in articulate and specific terms and is available for anyone to read. This makes the documents vital resource for businesses, researchers, academics and others who want to continue upwards with developments in their fields and capitalize on what has already been done. Visit the Intellectual property and copyright folio to acquire how to access the collection.

Protect it

Let'south be honest. Contest is vehement, which means that protecting your creation starts well before you lot're prepare to sell your product or service.

Accept the right steps to protect and exploit your innovation as much as possible. Like concrete assets, these IP rights must be acquired and monitored to maximize their value.

Venture capitalists, angel investors and other financing organizations may want to fund your cosmos, specially if y'all can show yous own it. Since IP rights are recognized as assets, you may even exist able to utilize them as collateral for a banking concern loan.

Licensing to other parties can be a vital revenue stream when you lot enter new markets across Canada and in other countries. For offset-ups, licensing is typically the fastest style to generate cash menses.

Still not sure what IP assets yous take? Take a closer look at each of them below.

Copyright

But put, copyright means "the right to copy," and copyright law prohibits others from copying specific types of works without your permission. Copyright is the exclusive legal correct to produce, reproduce, publish or perform an original literary, artistic, dramatic or musical work, including reckoner software programs, sound recordings and communications signals. Regardless of their merit or commercial value, Canadian law considers all original creative works to be copyright cloth.

Dissimilar with other IP rights, you own the copyright to your piece of work as presently every bit y'all create it. In Canada, a certificate of registration of copyright can exist used as evidence that copyright exists and that the person who registered it is the owner. Visit the Copyright folio to learn how you can register your copyright. You can apply to register a copyright at whatever time afterwards you create something. In well-nigh cases, copyright expires l years after the creator'due south expiry.

Trademarks

A registered trademark is a way of protecting your corporate or brand identity. Everything that sets your business organization autonomously—its proper name, production and service names, slogans, logos, taglines, modes of packaging, moving images, holograms, colours, scents, tastes, textures and even sounds—produces a make image that your customers come to know.

By registering your trademark, you gain the exclusive right to use the mark across Canada for ten years. Registration is renewable every 10 years afterward that.

Trademarks that are not registered still offer some protection but can exist challenging to enforce. Registering your trademark will help you protect your brand from imitation and misuse.

Why bother? Having a registered trademark can boost investor confidence, build your reputation and become a revenue source through licensing or franchising. What if your company name eventually becomes ameliorate known than your product? If you own it, you tin leverage it. And why shouldn't y'all? It's your identity.

Patents

Patents: the big picture

Patents allow inventors to profit financially from their inventiveness. This is an attractive incentive for inquiry and development, which ultimately benefits all Canadians. Without the possibility of protection, many people might not take the take chances of investing the time or coin needed to create or improve new products. Be bold. Put your creation out there. Grow it, leverage it, and savour it.

Patents give inventors exclusive rights to their inventions for up to twenty years, which tin can requite them a competitive advantage in the market. Y'all tin can generate acquirement by manufacturing and selling your invention without it, but having a patent allows you lot to take action confronting other people who employ, make or sell your invention without permission.

Why non just keep your information a merchandise secret? Things that are hard to conceive simply easy to deconstruct are prime patent material. Patents can heave the conviction of investors and shareholders, considering they demonstrate your commitment to protecting your invention. With a patent, you can also enter into licensing agreements that allow someone else to exploit your patent for a fee. You tin as well sell your patent. But y'all can't license or sell something that you don't own.

The earlier you start thinking near how the patent process could use to your cosmos, the amend. In Canada, patents are granted to the starting time inventor to file an application, so it is smart to file as before long as possible after yous complete your invention in example someone else is doing something similar. Even if yous can prove that yous were the beginning to think of the invention, you lose the race if a competing inventor files before you do. If you have disclosed your invention without applying for a patent, move quickly—y'all have 12 months from disclosure to file!

Even if there are similar patents already published, a minor but inventive improvement or variation might still be eligible for protection. In fact, 90 percentage of new patents are for improvements to existing inventions.

Industrial designs

Industrial designs vs. patents

An industrial design protects the visual appearance of a product—its ornament, shape, pattern or configuration, or any combination of these features applied to a finished commodity.

A patent protects new products, processes, machines, chemical compositions and improvements to any of these. Most patents today are new and useful improvements of existing inventions.

Industrial designs can give a production a competitive edge in the market place. To sell a product, there are multiple factors to consider, including price, functionality, reputation and aesthetics. Consumers are oft fatigued to an center-catching product; accordingly, manufacturers put a lot of money and know-how into their industrial designs. An effective design volition appeal to the consumer and even create an emotional connection between the consumer, the production and the brand. It tin influence consumer behavior, ultimately supporting the marketing and sales of the product. This is why a novel design is considered to exist valuable IP.

Why annals? Unless you annals your pattern, you tin't make a legal claim of ownership. By registering your pattern, y'all gain the legal right to foreclose others from making, importing, renting or selling an article that uses your blueprint for upwards to 15 years.

In Canada, at that place is no fourth dimension limit for registering an industrial design, equally long equally the blueprint has never been disclosed to the public, in Canada or anywhere in the world. If your design has been disclosed, you lot must file for registration within 12 months of its disclosure. It was your inventiveness, so why not own the rights to it?

Go far happen

In that location are costs associated with protecting your IP, and many inventors and creators are reluctant to make the investment. Just ask yourself: how does the cost of protecting your IP compare to the time and coin you accept invested in your work?

Let CIPO help

CIPO tin provide information nigh IP to help yous develop your IP strategy and can offering aid in navigating its databases.

CIPO also maintains lists of registered trademark agents and registered patent agents you lot can hire to assist you. Hiring a registered agent is not mandatory, simply is highly recommended.

Have the first step

Take the beginning pace in protecting your IP by learning more than about how IP rights apply to your work. Develop an IP strategy that will assistance you make the most of your original creations.

Visit the Intellectual property and copyright page to find information, tools and services that might be right for you.

Accomplish usa by telephone at 1-866-997-1936 or by email with your questions.

Stay connected on social media.

More resources

Through Innovation Canada, the Government of Canada is simplifying its suite of innovation programs into a one-end shop, so that innovators and entrepreneurs will no longer need to spend time figuring out which section to get to or which program best meets their needs. Visit the Business and industry page to find out more about all of the programs that enable and support Canadian businesses and innovators.

Observe out more at Canada.ca/intellectualproperty

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Engagement modified:: 2020-07-10

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Source: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cipointernet-internetopic.nsf/eng/wr04312.html