Previously in our Taking the Scary Out of Startup series, we discussed “Leader = vision + passion + unending drive.” Today’s topic highlights the need to identify and protect intellectual property (IP) as a must do. But this is not an area where you would think that we at Traklight would have needed help. From day one, we have had advisory board members that are attorneys, and identifying IP to protect it is what we do.
Identify & protect your IP
We were cool with the identify step but when it came to protecting it we decided to go the do-it-yourself route. We were very small at the time and extremely shortsighted and we filed several trademarks on our own. We experienced the “no do-over†policy first hand. We did not pick the correct classes for several marks and could not make corrections. Instead we have to completely resubmit including paying the fees again. Ouch!
We now have a family of trademarks and we had an attorney review all the classes to make sure we are protecting our IP properly.
Whoops! Whose picture is that?
We do a lot of presenting and we love humor. We licensed some funny IP cartoons that were only available for education and not to be posted online. Therefore we had to be very careful that those slides were not posted on Slideshare.
We did inadvertently pull several pictures and put into a different slide deck to present without checking if we were allowed to use them. There were several that were not permissible so we had to pull that down and redo the deck on Slideshare.net.