Intellectual Property Rights: To Protect and Not Infringe:

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Our next topic is why it is important to protect your intellectual property rights.   Check out the top 2 reasons below:

1. Most importantly, a competing business may decide to use your intellectual property (names, logos, inventions, written works, etc.) as their own due to the fact your business has built goodwill or has developed a strong brand.  This scenario can result in lost customers, sales, and business.

2. Second, if you do not protect your intellectual property rights, your business can miss out on the opportunity to earn royalty income from licensing of your intellectual property.

In addition, it is important that you or your company are not committing some of the offenses above.  So before bringing intellectual property to the market, do a search (you can use Google as a preliminary search, but you should hire an attorney to do a search) to determine if another business or individual has competing rights against your intellectual property.  If you introduce intellectual property to the market that infringes on another's rights, your company's growth may be restricted or legal action can be taken against your company.

Next topic: How to protect your particular intellectual property