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Importance of Intellectual Property for Business

In today’s competitive world innovation has become the only differentiating factor for the businesses to survive. Innovation means anything which has novelty and your idea which has helped you to start a new business. But it is very much possible that before your idea comes on the ground – it might be overtaken by others. So it becomes important for businesses to secure their innovation by intellectual property rights. Intellectual property is important not only for technology companies but is essential for every business that do invest in research or to create something meaningful.

Why it is important?

  • Provides incentive to individuals for their effort and crating something novel.
  • Provides legal rights to protect their creations.
  • Material reward for their intellectual property.
  • Enables the business to produce genuine and original products thus strengthening their brand value.

Types of Intellectual Property

There are six types of intellectual property but for businesses – the knowledge of four types are very crucial. Below the important four have been listed below:

  1. Copyrights

Copyrights protect individual rights to their authentic and novel creation in the fields of mainly literature, music, artistic works and software. Owning a copyright provides you exclusive rights to produce, adapt and distribute as you want. Your rights starts from the moment you created the work but registration is voluntary.

  1. Patents

A patent grants you to some extent a monopoly on your inventions, enabling you to exclude the others from producing, using or selling the invention. This is the most important aspect of intellectual property rights for businesses and it should be protected from the beginning to get the protection and advantage over others.

  1. Trademarks

A trademark is a word, phrase or symbol or logo that makes businesses to distinguish themselves from others. For example, the logo of Levis gives an authenticity to buyer that this product is genuinely belongs to the producing company. However, before filing a trademark, you should be careful that someone else is not using the same trademark. You can make sure by Indian government IP database.

  1. Trade secrets

A trade secret is formula, process or device or other crucial business information which keeps your business stand apart from others and gives you an edge over competitors in the same business. For example, KFC recipe of chicken can be counted as a trade secret.   However, it is loosely protected by law and it depends more upon the businesses how they continue to keep secret their important business information.

It is important not only for businesses but for common man to be aware about intellectual property rights because any individual can turn into an entrepreneur. The knowledge of this will enable the individuals to get the monetary award of their research and time given to produce something innovative and novel.

In the next article, I will talk about intellectual property rights in India and how to avail it.

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