Intellectual Property
Rights Pros and Cons
Your company’s name,
logo and even your products belong, well, to your company. In a perfect world,
that’s how things would remain. These are all forms of intellectual property –
you own the rights to that property (intellectual property rights).
However, this is far from a perfect world. A quick look at the number of
lawsuits revolving around IPR should highlight just how easily one company can
infringe on another’s rights, even unintentionally. It also seems to make sense
that if you have rights to intellectual property, you should fight for those rights.
Is that always the case? Actually, there are quite a few pros and cons here.
Intellectual Property
Rights Pros
There are quite a few
pros to protecting your rights in terms of intellectual property. For instance,
patents, trademarks and
copyrights all give your business important advantages and incentives.
Trademarks allow you to build your brand and create a stronger company. That
applies to every other company out there, as well. Copyright ensures that a
creator continues to own his or her artistic creation (books, artwork, graphic
design work, etc.). Patents foster invention and
innovation, as well as encouraging inventors to fully explain what’s being
invented and how it works.
Intellectual Property
Rights Cons
While there are plenty
of pros in favor of protecting your rights, there are a few drawbacks here as
well. For instance, copyright can be given to works that truly don’t deserve
protection under the law, and patents can be given to frivolous things
(Amazon’s patenting of “pictures on a white background” is a perfect example of
patent frivolity). Other cons involve costs – protecting your rights can be
very expensive. Intellectual property rights lawyers (IPR
lawyers), court costs, settlement fees, filing fees and numerous other costs
can mount very quickly, making protection of intellectual property rights
expensive for even very large companies.
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