Your intellectual property, an asset to be secured for the future of your business.
Intellectual property is a key part of your business. What does it include?
Every young entrepreneur will quickly find himself confronted with obstacles that he may not have experienced until now, in his professional life, whether it is the creation of a business plan, the drafting of statutes, the approach of incubators or funders, from the manufacture of the first prototypes of products or services, to marketing.
Whatever the field of activity, every company aims to create intellectual property, to which young entrepreneurs are still too little aware.
In particular, this may include:
These elements represent significant economic value for your business. They will be taken into account by your future investors, and in calculating a future resale price.
Securing your intellectual property is an investment in the future of your business.
From the early stages of creating a business, research should be carried out in order to ensure the following points:
Registering a trademark will allow you to have priority in relation to third parties.
A trademark is considered available when it is not used in an identical or similar manner by an economic operator for identical or similar products or services.
An initial search for precedence on the registers of INPI and the OHIM will allow you, at first, to be informed of the existence of an identical trademark.
The search for precedence should also focus on similar marks, in order to avoid confusion.
As for distinctiveness, it will be about the ability of your brand to form its own identity in relation to the product or service it identifies. It is necessary for your brand to be sufficiently far from the products or services in question (no necessary, generic, common terms for identifying the product or service, nor a descriptive term).
The unavailability or lack of distinctiveness of your brand can call into question your commercial and marketing strategy. Indeed, it will be possible for the owner of the earlier trademark to successfully oppose your use of the trademark. Investments made on the basis of this name will be lost, especially if they are branded physical products or online visibility strategies.
The software that will be created by your company integrates, in addition to your own code, components under various and varied licenses. In particular, free or open-source licenses should be given special consideration. These licenses may prevent commercial use, or require you to place any derivative contributions under the same license. Analyzing these licenses will allow you to better understand the possibilities offered by these community components, as well as their limitations.
In addition, you should think about the license you want to apply to your finished product. Do you want to redistribute them to the community or keep total control of them? These questions depend on your business philosophy and should be consistent throughout your product development cycle.
A source code repository at Program Protection Agency will also allow you to set the date of creation of the program as well as your author status, for later proof purposes.
Taking these issues into account early will allow you to protect yourself against risks, both financial and operational, but also the loss of precious time during the creation phase.
The cost and the risks of legal proceedings should also not be overlooked. The implementation of a strategy to protect your intellectual property will allow you to minimize this hazard and to place yourself in a proactive position from which you will have all the cards to make your investment grow.
The firm can assist you, from the creation of your company, in order to register your brands Or of protect your software and better understand applicable licenses.
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I have been supporting software and SaaS companies for more than 10 years, to structure their business, protect their intellectual property and improve their contracts.
