The Top Five Reasons Entrepreneurs Should Learn About IP Law

The following is a condensed version of one of my most popular early posts.  It summarizes some of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen as a lawyer.  I’ve spent many years fighting in court about intellectual property ownership and cleaning up IP messes in startups.  I really prefer prevention.  In this post, I’ve linked to some of my later posts that explain the topics in more detail and give specific tips about IP protection and avoiding legal liability.

In the many years I’ve been practicing intellectual property (“IP”) law, I’ve seen a wide range of mistakes and bad practices that have cost emerging growth companies millions of dollars.  In many cases, startup founders could have avoided expensive, thorny legal problems with a little information about IP law and some simple precautions.

If you are starting a company, here are five of my favorite reasons to learn about IP law.

Learn more about IP law if you want to:

Keep the intellectual property that you create for your startup free of ownership claims by your former employer

If you are working on your new venture while employed by another company in the same industry, you should watch out. It’s important to learn about IP law if you want to make sure the intellectual property you create for your new startup won’t be the subject of ownership claims by your former employer.  This is a popular type of litigation in Silicon Valley.

Knowing how to keep and carve out the intellectual property rights to what you create for your new company can be critical for your startup’s ultimate success. You need to know what information you can use from your employer without running the risk of trade secret misappropriation claims.  You need to take precautions to narrow the net of what your former employer may claim.

For more information on this topic see the following posts:

• Analyzing the Risk That My Current Employer May Claim Rights to My Startup’s IP
• Bratz Doll Designer’s $100 Million Dollar Mistakes
• Trade Secret Law 101:  Why Entrepreneurs Should Care About Trade Secret Law
• Minimize the Risk of Being Sued By Your Former Employer
• Preventing Your California Employer From Owning Your Inventions

Learn more about IP law if you want to:

Increase the odds that you can use your company and product names without being stopped by another trademark owner

After picking names you love for your business, products, and services, incorporating your company, building a website, and working hard to promote your brand, it is highly disturbing, disappointing, and expensive to have a trademark owner accuse you of trademark infringement and demand that you stop using your business name and take down your website.

And unfortunately, it happens frequently to uninformed entrepreneurs.

Learning about trademark law and doing some basic groundwork before selecting business and product names can save you from big headaches and expenses down the road.  You can greatly increase the odds that you can use your company and product names without being stopped by another trademark owner.  Few people want to start over from scratch.

For more information on this topic see the following posts:

• Why It’s Important To Consider Trademark Law When Picking Business and Product Names for Your Startup
• How to Avoid Trademark Infringement

Learn more about IP law if you want to:

Make sure your startup owns the intellectual property rights created by its founders, independent contractors, and employees

Many, many startups don’t own the intellectual property rights to intellectual property created by its founders, employees, web designers, logo designers, software developers, and other independent contractors.

It doesn’t matter that your startup paid for the creation of the work!

Failure to have signed, written agreements with the proper legal language that transfers intellectual property rights to the startup from everyone who creates IP for it is a classic mistake.  Many of the legal rules about IP ownership are counterintuitive, highly specific, and complicated.  Moreover, many self-drafted contracts and random contracts from the Web don’t have the proper IP assignment language. Mentioning who will own what is not enough.  Bad contracts will give you a false sense of security and really screw your startup over when an investor actually hires lawyers to do due diligence.

It’s important to learn about intellectual property law to understand what you need to do to own IP rights.

For more information on this topic see the following posts:

• The Biggest Startup Blunder:  Failing To Secure Ownership of Your Startup’s IP
• Why Copyright Assignments Can Be Critical For Your Startup
• Who Owns the Rights To Custom Software

Learn more about IP law if you want to:

Minimize the chance of liability for IP infringement

Ignorance is not bliss.  It can get you sued.

And as some unfortunate software developers learned, trade secret misappropriation can even land you in jail.

Read the liability sections of the free ebook, IP Law For Startups FAQ, at iplawforstartups.com to learn more about how to avoid legal liability for trade secret misappropriation, trademark infringement, copyright infringement, and patent infringement.

Learn more about IP law if you want to:

Get legal protection for intellectual property that is created for your startup

Different intellectual property laws have specific requirements for obtaining legal protection.  To get protection, you must follow the rules. You don’t want to blow it and lose protection for your million-dollar invention or product because you didn’t know what you needed to do.  Courts don’t protect the careless.

To learn more about inexpensive trademark, trade secret, and copyright protection, see the following posts:

• Federal Trademark Registration
• Tips for Identifying and Protecting Trade Secrets
• Copyrights and Licenses

Learning about IP law is more interesting than you may think when you have your dream business at stake.  With a little information and some basic steps, you can protect your intellectual property and avoid legal liability.

Jill Hubbard Bowman is an intellectual property attorney in Austin, Texas.  Jill helps startups protect their intellectual property and avoid legal liability.