The Intellectual Property Ladder

It is seen by many as one of the next great commercial battlegrounds, but your Intellectual Property can as soon have you climbing the walls as climbing the business food chain.

Intellectual Property. As a phrase, it really could mean anything from a des res semi (in Braintree perhaps?) to Stephen Fry’s bachelor pad. So, unless you happen to be a big noise in corporate law, you can probably be forgiven for not realising that recent years have seen it quickly but quietly emerging as one of the biggest, most important issues for businesses in the Internet age. Honestly, who would have thought such an apparently niche commercial backwater would become such a big deal?

Big deal it is though, and the first step in understanding why is to remind oneself that – crazy as it may sound – we now live in a world in which the name of a business, its logo, even the font it’s written in, can be worth more than the very products and services that the company provides. Shapes, colours, words – you can even trademark sounds these days.

As such, while Intellectual Property might not appear on the average balance sheet, it can very often be a business’s single biggest asset. OK, but why all the fuss now all of a sudden? It’s been possible to ring-fence company names and logos and so on since the year dot hasn’t it?

Well, in essence, yes. Intellectual Property is currently protected by something called Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) – which in fact is simply a catch-all term used to describe the various mechanisms for safeguarding a person or organisation’s rights over their ideas, products, information and so on. Some, such as copyright, simply exist and can be invoked without formal registration. Others, like patents and trademarks, must be paid for.

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