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Defend your intellectual property with contracts

by | Jun 25, 2015 | Business Formation & Planning

When you run a business, your priority is to make money and to make a good impression on the community. You’ve built your business from the ground up, and you spend time making sure your company is one of a kind. One of the ways you do this is by offering services that people can’t get elsewhere. In order to protect those services and to make them available to your clients only, you may have made your employees sign paperwork that said they wouldn’t share that information with competitors.

Anything you design or create for your company, whether it’s a cartoon character or a new product, is your intellectual property. Leaking a new item to a competitor could mean that another similar item would be released quickly, hurting your sales. Sometimes, giving this information to a competitor could lead to them producing the item first and reaping the rewards.

To combat this issue, you need to copyright your products and make sure that your employees don’t leak information that isn’t theirs to share. You can copyright each of your products and include information in your employees’ contract that explains what will happen if they share information. If you find that your information has been leaked, you may be able to pursue a lawsuit if that kind of copyright or a confidentiality clause has been breached.

A confidentiality agreement and other kinds of legal contracts can help protect you and your intellectual property. Our website has more information on these contracts and how you can use them to make sure your employees are faithful to the business.