IP assignment or licence? A checklist for business owners
Check ownership, permissions and handover before transferring copyright, a website, software, a logo, a trade mark or a domain name.
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Intellectual property and commercial contract guides
Practical explanations and checklists for intellectual property and commercial contracts. Read the guidance, organise the decisions and explore the relevant documents.
What is a Trademark?
Understand what a trade mark protects and how it differs from a company name, domain name or copyright.
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Websites
A website consists of content accessible through the internet. The website of a local seafood restaurant could be as simple as a single homepage displaying the business name and logo, a…
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Website Design and Development
Your website is the first impression that many potential customers will have of your business. For that reason, it is crucial that the site be visually appealing, easy to navigate, and…
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Protection of Confidential Information
It is critical to understand that once the information you wish to protect has been disclosed to the public, nothing can put the genie back in the bottle and make it confidential again. At…
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Registering a Patent
Unlike other forms of intellectual property such as trade marks and copyrights, inventions that are available to the public cannot be protected without registration and government approval.
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Selecting and Registering a Domain Name
Unlike trade marks, domain names are not technically owned by the user. Domain names must be registered in the domain name system (DNS) database, upon which the registrant is granted the…
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Trade Mark Licensing
Creative trade mark licensing can greatly increase a company’s revenues, as well as expand its brand identification and sales reach into territories that otherwise would fall outside of its…
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Overview of Confidentiality and Non-disclosure
The success or failure of a business depends on its ability to maintain a competitive advantage, and a company’s competitive advantage often depends on its ability to maintain the…
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Overview of Patents
A patent is the legal right to preclude another person from making, selling, offering to sell, using or importing any product or process that is covered by the patent. So if you have…
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Passing Off
Although it is much easier to enforce a trade mark if it is registered, it is also possible to seek damages for the common law tort of “passing off”, regardless of whether the trade mark…
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Patent Maintenance and Enforcement
Once a patent has issued on your invention, you will be able to preclude anybody else from using it in the designated countries for the term of the patent. However, you need to maintain the…
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Maximizing Value: How to Sell or License a Patent
After spending a large amount of time and money obtaining, maintaining and enforcing a patent, it makes sense to get as much value out of that asset as possible. The most obvious way to do…
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Maximizing Value: Sale or License of a Trade Mark
Compare selling a trade mark with licensing it, and identify the commercial terms and ownership checks each route needs.
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Licensing a Patent
Licensing a patent is much more complicated than a simple assignment. In fact, a Patent License Agreement could be one of the most complex agreements any company has to negotiate. But a…
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Introduction to Intellectual Property
Intellectual property rights allow you to legally protect the inventions, brands, logos, written material, software, designs and the like that you create for your business. The legal…
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How to Register a Trade Mark
The first step in protecting a trade mark used in your business is to identify the names, brands, logos, etc. that you want to register. However, there is more to this than initially meets…
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Establishing a Website
Websites have become an integral part of running almost any line of business in today’s technology-driven economy. Although it may still be possible to do business the old fashioned way…
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Enforcement of Trade Marks
Once you have registered your trade mark in Ireland or another country, no one may use the same or a similar mark in relation to the same class of goods or services without your permission.…
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Domain Names and Trade Marks
The intersection of domain names and trade marks has become a complicated area of the law that you should have some familiarity with when selecting and registering, or buying, a domain…
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Domain Names
A domain name is the key portion of a website’s internet address. Examples include microsoft.com, wikipedia.org, and subway.ie. As with trade marks, a good domain name will be memorable and…
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Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreements
To remove as much doubt as possible from any situation requiring the disclosure of sensitive commercial and technical information, a Confidentiality and Non-disclosure Agreement should be…
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Buying and Selling a Patent
In general, buying and selling a patent is much the same as buying and selling a tangible asset. The buyer should perform its own due diligence on the asset to make sure it is buying what…
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Buying and Selling a Domain Name
Because there are hundreds of millions of domain names that have already been registered, you may have difficulty finding one that you are satisfied with for your business. And even if you…
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An Introduction to Trademarks
Plan the ownership, clearance and protection of a new business brand before investing in its launch.
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