Knock it off
Knowing the value of your intellectual property is one thing – protecting it is another. Laura Newbold Breen explains how to safeguard your ideas.
Intellectual property (IP) is the foundation for all designs, creative works and brands. Like any business asset, IP is fundamental to growth. However, understanding IP can be a bit of a minefield and copyists can often prey on this to push their infringing agenda.
Sadly, IP theft is rife. From high street retailers stealing ideas from lone and micro creative businesses to mass manufacturers churning out cheap copies of original designs; it is so important to look after your IP from the get go. Now, with generative AI looking to cherry pick from a plethora of existing information to create ideas quickly without, as yet, any recognition of original ownership, we have to be ‘IP Savvy’ more than ever.
The brand confusion caused within markets where a substandard copy is imitating the real thing is potentially hugely damaging to the original. Aldi has faced court cases from brands including M&S and Thatchers, who accused it of copying their products. Another international giant, Shein, has long been under the ethical spotlight, while producing extremely cheap fashion ‘knock-offs’. Again, IP is the important piece in this puzzle to mitigate any brand damage if you’re unfortunate enough to be copied.
Anti Copying in Design (ACID) is here to help you navigate the trials of IP. It is the UK’s leading membership and campaigning organisation for design and intellectual property. ACID is a trade association for designers and manufacturers with a diverse membership ranging from individuals to multinationals, and spanning many industry sectors. The organisation is committed to fighting design theft and lobbying Parliament for design law reform.
At ACID, we believe in these top tips for success:
1 Understand IP Basics
It’s important to understand the basics:
A registered trade mark is a unitary right. It lasts for life if you renew it every 10 years. A trade mark can be your company name, product name, or you can trade mark a new design range – and you can trade mark logos as well. If you register your trade mark you can include the symbol ®. If you don’t register your trademark, you can use ™ instead in the UK.
Copyright lasts for life plus 70 years and is an automatic right in the UK (meaning you don’t need to register it). However, it’s good to have an audit trail for proof and date of ownership (more on this later). Always use © followed by yours or your company name and year to denote copyright ownership.
Patents cover inventions and last for 20 years, requiring regular renewal, but you can only file for a patent if you have kept your idea out of the public domain, that means you’ve only shared it with your patent lawyer/advisor or under a confidentiality agreement.
Trade Secrets are your knowledge, skills, technical information and know-how; guard them with your life and keep them to yourself.
Design rights – there are three types:
Registered, which last for 25 years provided you renew them every five, and give you the strongest scope of design protection, including colour, material, ornamentation and so on.
Unregistered last between three-15 years depending on when your design reached market, and cover “shape and configuration” only. In the latter five years, these can be requested as licensable, meaning somebody can copy it but must pay you a royalty.
Supplementary, lasting for up to three years, was brought in post Brexit to replace the EU unregistered right in the UK, under which the UK can benefit from protection of one or more of the following: lines, colour, shape, ornamentation, contours, texture or materials.
You can find out all about IP rights in more detail on the IPO website at gov.co.uk.
2 Take Advice Before You Disclose Information
It’s important not to give anything away too early on until you’ve had legal advice. It might be that you have come up with a potentially patentable process, or a new, sustainable material.
Equally, trade secrets are your hidden weapon. Keep anything like recipes, manufacturing processes, business agreements and so on to yourself.
ACID members have access to an hour’s free legal advice per issue, and reduced legal fees thereafter, from a choice of six legal affiliates.
3 Check For Existing Work
Ensure you are not copying and potentially infringing somebody else’s design rights or trade marks to mitigate any risk of you being accused of infringement by searching the IPO for existing registered trade marks, designs and patents within the UK – the gov.co.uk website provides a searchable database.
However, sometimes it can be difficult to decipher how similar something is. Again, ACID’s legal affiliates can help here and that hour’s free advice is an invaluable tool of IP strategy planning.
4 Keep Records & Be Prepared
An audit trail is a key element of your preparation during the various stages of design (concept, design drawings, prototypes and different progress iterations).
Sign and date all your work. Most ACID cases have settled based on strong evidence to support unregistered designs. Make sure that this information is to hand.
Though unregistered rights exist in design and copyright works, should you ever suspect anyone of copying your work, you will need to provide an audit trail to prove date of creation and ownership. ACID members have unlimited use of the ACID IP Databank -a free, secure vault for members to upload designs and important documents to obtain a Police Intellectual Property Unit (PIPCU) endorsed certificate with a unique, tamper proof number. This gives third party evidence for that all important audit trail. The ACID IP Databank has a 10MB file limit, so you can even upload videos.
If you don’t want to be copied, say so. There’s no more powerful message on your website/marketing material. Something along the lines of, “All the intellectual property in our designs belongs to (your name). Any infringements will be pursued seriously.”
ACID members are licenced to use the ACID logo on all their marketing collateral, which is a powerful deterrent to would be copyists. It shows you know your IP rights and ACID are on your side.
5 Stay in The Know
ACID runs a number of free webinars on a variety of IP subjects on a monthly basis.
Online brand protection can often feel like a game of whack-a-mole, with copycats popping up all over the various marketplaces. ACID partner SnapDragon Monitoring offers all ACID members a free initial brand check and 15% off their online monitoring fees.
BPMA members can join SnapDragon Monitoring to learn all about website cloning and how to tackle brand impersonation issues through a webinar on 24 October at 12.30.
ACID members can access these webinar recordings any time, as well as a plethora of factsheets and information, and that all important free legal advice and deterring ACID logo.
Joining ACID will ensure you can stay up to speed with IP developments and combat the copyists.
- Laura Newbold Breen, ACID’s CEO, has extensive experience in intellectual property having served 10 years as head of legal for Magmatic Ltd, previous owner of the Trunki brand.
Protect Your Website
Register for the BPMA’s ACID Lunchtime Learning webinar on Combating Fraudulent Websites by going to this link (https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYkd–tqzIsEt2ALUKFV8Cegm8aXUHs_PuO#/registration).
The webinar takes place on 24 October at 12.30 and will cover website cloning and how to tackle brand impersonation issues.
Don’t miss it.
