Patents protect useful and nonobvious inventions. Like trademarks, they are local so just because you have a patent in the US does not mean you have rights anywhere else. In fact, filing in the US starts the clock running elsewhere and if you are not careful you can lose your rights.
Finally, consider both trade secrets and rights of privacy/publicity. Both are creatures of state law and the reach of each vary gratefully by state. Generally, a trade secret is any non-public information which gives the holder takes steps to maintain as confidential and gives the holder a competitive advantage. You need not be a celebrity to have a right of publicity, but the scope varies greatly. It protects your name, image, likeness etc. from unauthorized commercial use.
So how does all of this come together. Who, for example, owns an employee’s LinkedIn contacts? What can you do if someone posts untrue information about your or your company, or creates a yourcompanystinks.com website. How do you even know there is such a posting? How, in short, can you protect your brand and your intellectual property in the wild west world of the internet?
A few simple and relatively inexpensive steps:
1. Register your rights, including trademarks and copyrights
2. Brand your domain, and prevent domain hijacking by ensuring your domain is locked. Prevent squatting by buying multiple domains.
3. Track mentions of your brand online. You can do this simply with Google Alerts. There are also numerous free tools available to track and analyze what is said about your company, such as Social Mention and Tweet Reach, among others.
4. Send out appropriate and polite demands for infringers to cease, but remember that your demand could easily wind up posted online by the infringer. And UDRP proceedings are quick and inexpensive, if someone has hijacked your domain.
Randy Friedberg has more than 25 years of experience in counseling clients, with a particular focus on the protection, licensing and enforcement of intellectual property rights. His practice encompasses trademark and copyright law, unfair competition, trade secrets, advertising matters, internet and cyber matters, rights of privacy and publicity, and entertainment law, as well as general corporate and litigation matters.