Protect Your Business Idea

Protect your business plan legally

There are a number of different legal provisions that you can employ to protect various aspects of your business such as visual identity, or an invention you plan to market. This section clarifies your rights under these provisions once in place, and provides detail on how to go about applying for them, what qualifications are required in order to be granted them, and the costs involved.

1. Patents
   Protection for inventions. Inventions must be new (first in the world); be useful (functional and operative); show inventive ingenuity and not be obvious to someone skilled in that area. It can be a product, a composition, an apparatus, a process or an improvement on any of these.
2. Trade-marks
   Trade-mark registration gives you exclusive rights to words, symbols and designs, or combinations of these, that distinguish your wares or services from those of someone else.
3. Copyrights
   Protection for books and maps; lyrics and musical scores; sculptures and paintings; photographs, films and tapes; computer programs and databases.
4. Industrial Design
   An industrial design must be an original shape, pattern or ornamentation applied to a manufactured article. The shape of a table or the decoration on the handle of a spoon are examples of industrial designs.
5. Integrated Circuit Topographies
   The electronic circuits of an integrated circuit (IC) product are embodied in a three-dimensional hill and valley configuration called topography.