In broad terms intellectual property concerns the “property of the mind”. In today’s world of freely available information from multiple sources it is imperative that information or ideas, which have been created by your mind, be protected from exploitation and unauthorised use.
Small business owners generally have little time to think about anything but the day-to-day running of their business. Running a small business can be extremely time consuming and keeping abreast of, and complying with, the legal requirements of protecting your intellectual property leaves little time to work on the expansion and marketing of your business.
At The Quinn Group our team of lawyers can relieve much of the burden for you when you are looking to patent an invention, register a trade mark or design or protect your intellectual property from piracy or passing off. We concentrate on protecting your business so that you can concentrate on running it!
We understand intellectual property protection is important to encourage innovation. Without legal protection business concepts, novel approaches, inventions, artistic creations, patents and trademarks are left susceptible to piracy, counterfeiting, or passing off.
Without legal intellectual property protection there would be no incentive for companies to conduct Research and Development programs, authors to produce novels, computer programmers to develop innovative software or companies to advertise in order to increase their trade mark recognition just to name a few examples.
At The Quinn Group we can assist you with various aspects of intellectual property law and protecting your ‘property of the mind’ including:
- Patents and patent law,
- Patent registration and advice,
- Copyright registration, and copyright law
- Copyright advice, and information
- Trademark registration, and trademark law
- Trademark information and advice,
- Intellectual property litigation.
Some the most common intellectual property protection methods include:
Patents
A patent protects the use of ideas or information either in products or processes. Patents give effective protection if you have invented new technology that will lead to a product, composition or process with significant long-term commercial gain.
Trademarks
Are “Signs” such as names, words and logos that businesses use to identify themselves and the goods and services they provide.
The difference between trade marks, business, company and domain names sometimes causes confusion. Registration of a business, company or domain name does not in itself give you any proprietary rights, only a trademark does.
A trademark is used to distinguish the goods or services of one trader from those of other traders. Registration of a trade mark gives the registered owner exclusive use of the trade mark throughout Australia.
Designs
Designs protect the appearance of, or overall look of a product providing a monopoly over such features as ornamentation, pattern, shape and configuration.
Copyright
Copyright is the exclusive right to do, or to authorise another person to do, certain acts in relation to the work or subject matter.
Copyright can be applied to original literary works, original dramatic works, original music works, original artistic works, sound recordings, cinematographic films, television, sound broadcasts and published editions of works.
Unlike patents, copyright does not protect the idea itself but the words (or otherwise) that express the idea.
If you have any enquiries about protecting your intellectual property or perhaps you have concerns that your intellectual property is being pirated, infringed or duplicated contact us now by submitting an online enquiry form or call 1300 QUINNS or on +61 2 9223 9166.
