Every person and business already owns one kind of intellectual property… perhaps without knowing. This is copyright, which automatically protects anything you write or draw which has any originality – even a business flyer or customer database – as a literary or artistic work.
Software, photographs, audio and video all also enjoy copyright.
In some countries such as the United States, copyrights can be registered to prove ownership, but in Britain no registration is required or available, and so copyrights are entirely free.
However, to protect your copyrights, you need to keep your records in order.
To enforce your copyright or design right, you must show that you really do own the rights. It is also wise to use the correct copyright marking – “© Year Created, Name of Copyright Owner” see the example below. You should keep all the original drawings and drafts, signed and dated by whoever produced them. Proving ownership may involve producing employment contracts for the author or designer. So keep all your records for as long as anything is commercially valuable.
Copyright will last for the lifetime of the author or designer – plus 70 years.
However copyright and design right can’t do everything. They can’t stop anyone who independently comes up with something looking similar – only design registrations can do this – or who produces a rival product that makes use of the ideas behind yours – for this you need a patent – and those rights aren’t free.