Startup companies protect intellectual property from both internal and external repair

A reporter asked me: intellectual property court and Shanghai through "about to speed up the construction of the opinions of the global influence of science and technology innovation center" to the start-up of small and medium enterprises have what meaning? I answer: two things that all roads lead to Rome, the biggest significance is to promote the whole society's awareness of intellectual property, and guide smes to establish with intellectual property erecting barriers to competition, and avoid the management idea of infringement of intellectual property rights of others. National policy guidance, for sure, but specific to each enterprise, you should set out from oneself circumstance, play well in the daily management of intellectual property rights this card, best can become innovation dongfeng tuyere "pig". Today, I'm going to talk to you about how to do both internal and external repair of intellectual property rights.

How to apply for external intellectual property rights?

The essence of intellectual property is intangible assets. As enterprises, it is necessary to use some concrete efforts to fix these intangible assets into their rights. In particular, patents, trademarks and copyright registrations are applied. For different start-ups, the key types of IP are different. Enterprise type can be divided into research and development, manufacturing, sales and service enterprises, for a variety of different enterprises, the need for protection of intellectual property types are different. In order to protect your intellectual property, you must first think about what your core competitive advantage is, and then treat the intellectual property rights that you need to protect against the core.

For example, production start-ups, patents and trademarks are more important. If the company is the original technology, others do not have, you should apply for patent protection, patent was granted, enterprises can establish barriers to competition, if there is a peer imitation technology, can use the patent right to fight rivals. In the same way, the trademark right is very important to the production enterprises, especially the technical barriers. Because the brand protects the brand, the brand can make the products of the enterprise establish the recognition among the consumers, so that consumers can make a distinction between the product of the start-up and the products of other enterprises. If someone is going to counterfeit your brand, you may face trademark infringement, which is seriously criminal responsibility.

In the case of creative enterprises and traditional software enterprises, copyright is obviously more important to them according to the author's service experience. Is content of copyright protection, the traditional software companies and the creative class enterprise's product or service is the external expression of products containing copyright, such as movies, music, software, literature, the core of the products is content, and the age of the Internet, copy the contents of the technical difficulty is greatly reduced, ordinary people through the computer to copy paste can spread any copyrighted works easily, therefore, for content production enterprises, how to protect their own content, without permission of the spread and replicate behavior has become a matter of life and death. The right to fight against infringement is copyright. According to the copyright law, copyright is protected from the date of creation, but the necessary registration will enable the copyright owner to better prove the right to belong to the rights of rights. Therefore, copyright registration is also important for traditional software enterprises and creative enterprises.

Ii. How does the start-up practice the internal work of intellectual property?

Apply for external intellectual property is very important, but it is not the key point of this article to tell as intellectual property lawyer, I think that most enterprises ignore intellectual property systems construction is the real focus of the protection of intellectual property rights. Company daily operations, in short, there will be a lot of original achievements, enterprises should establish as soon as possible to these achievements of intellectual property rights, the enterprise and the staff signed three agreements and establish the relevant systems is very important.

1. Attribution agreement of the position result.

The function of this agreement is to determine ownership of the content created by the performance of the employee during the employment period, which is owned by the enterprise. If this achievement is technology, the right to apply for a patent shall be owned by the enterprise, if the results are a variety of content, the content of the copyright shall belong to the enterprise all, if the result is a brand, the trademark right shall be owned by the enterprise. Start-up companies a big problem is easy to split, a lot of enterprises encounter internal employees perform their duties with their achievements obtained, into their competitors, at this point, if there is a post achievement attribution agreement, enterprise rights will be more convenient.

2. Confidentiality agreement.

Business operations can build a foothold in a competitive market, and there is always a unique point, but if you learn from your competitors, the competitive advantage will be discounted or non-existent. Most of the time, it's business secrets. A confidentiality agreement is a regulation of the employee's conservative trade secrets. For example, a biscuit production enterprise, the taste is good, the product internal and external sales have, the channel is more, the online and offline all involve, such enterprise has what business secret? Let's look at the production process, the enterprise will buy a lot of raw materials, involving supplier list and price information is the commercial secret, food enterprise products taste good, so the formula and technology of the biscuit production should be unlike most similar enterprises, formula and process is the commercial secret, the enterprise product sales, all channels of information, contact person's contact information and supply price, season different shipments per month, online sales, marketing strategy, pricing strategy, channel management, these are commercial secrets of the enterprises.

These are traditional businesses, and the business secrets of Internet companies are more difficult to detect. Such as a network game company, game program is divided into client and server side, the client object program, though users can get, but its source code is the commercial secret, the server application is not known to the user, regardless of the source program and object program is protected by copyright, but unknown program source code and server-side target is protected by the commercial secret. For online game company, and the procedure is also important to users of the game data, including the registration information and game role information, equipment, data, etc., these data because of the lack of originality is not protected by copyright, but the business secret protection, if the enterprise and employees signed a confidentiality agreement, the employee leaked the information will face a serious legal consequences, on the other hand, the enterprise is difficult to pursue.

The confidentiality agreement is also very useful for regulating the relationship between a start-up and a partner, and can prevent competitors from stealing trade secrets from the name of cooperation. For start-up companies, its cumulative data and business models without confidentiality agreement easy to imitate, if big companies to imitate doom may cause the enterprise market occupied. If a confidentiality agreement is signed before the cooperation with other companies, it can deter the partner to a certain extent and make it not easy to abuse the trade secrets obtained by the cooperation.

3. Non-compete agreements.

Of the labor contract law "promulgated in 2008 for the first time prescribed by the law, the non-compete system, the enterprise shall have the right to the payment under the premise of non-competition compensation, require employees within a certain period of time shall not be engaged in work related to the enterprise competition. In practice, a lot of people think this is the gentleman do not prevent a prevention system, because if the enterprise must hire an important talent, to avoid the non-compete, can let the home office, or rent the office alone, so it is difficult to obtain evidence for the talent of the employer. However, this kind of concern does not fully consider the situation of enterprise operation and management, at least for large companies, especially listed companies, the restriction of non-compete agreements is very strong.

The compliance requirements of listed companies is very high, general also relatively strict management system, imagine the hire a employee who non-compete obligation will cause the enterprise may be in unfair competition or intellectual property infringement litigation, the damage to the company's reputation will be greater than to hire the employee benefits. At the same time, if in order to avoid be forensics and other office rental, causes a lot of trouble to the company's management, the original management system will be a big impact on the company, therefore, for a large company, hire with non-compete obligation employees all kinds of cost and risk will far outweigh the benefits of the employees may be. Big companies face problems that small companies will encounter, although cost and risk will be smaller, but it does exist. Therefore, it is still useful for enterprises and employees to sign non-compete agreements, because the default cost of this agreement is not low.

Iii. What measures do startups have to avoid common intellectual property risks?

Start-ups are generally inexperienced and can be used to avoid risk.

1. The implementation of sexual retrieval risk

Founders generally more understanding of their products, if you think your product may have the risk of infringement of intellectual property can be sexually retrieval can be: the product launched in parts of product: practical on patent retrieval, retrieval scope including the main technology in the industry and competitors application technology, at least of their products is infringing intellectual property rights and other rights of others; To conduct trademark search on trademarks to see if they are infringing the brand of others; Copyright also depends on whether your product is infringing content. There are a lot of things that can be done to check out some of the problems, and at this point, the product should be evaluated, at least to the extent that the company's management has a deep understanding of intellectual property risk.

2. The normal edition of daily office software

The current operating system software, office software, design software many is paid software, enterprise shall to licensed software for their own use, does not necessarily have to pay, but a lot of software can use free software instead of charging software. In addition, it is required to manage the software installed on the internal computers of the enterprise, and restrict the installation of non-authorized software by employees. Charge many software enterprises is a member of the business software alliance, they have been to monitor all kinds of enterprises and rights protection, if the enterprise cannot manage the employee's computer, is likely to become the object of their rights.

3. The audit of propaganda content

Image rights is another major disaster area of intellectual property rights protection, a lot of enterprise's official weibo send pictures of the infringement of copyrighted works without permission to use others problems, after being rights frequently each image thousands of yuan for compensation. In the Internet era, advertising forms are diverse and the content is flexible, but if you don't pay attention to the copyright issue of the content of the propaganda pictures, the enterprise may face the price claim of the picture company.