Intellectual Property

This week we learnt about the legal stuff involved within freelancing and owning a business.

Daniel told us we can also pop onto the gov.uk website if we ever need more information on intellectual property.

Anything original that anyone creates is their intellectual property.

You own the rights to your work until you sell it and and it over to the client.

However, if you’re an employee, the designs you create for the company you work for is their intellectual property.

Daniel then went over different types of intellectual property, and which ways to protect it wit different licenses.

• Copyright is for content
• Patent is for a product
• TM is for a brand
• R is for registered trade mark

We also went over how to go about getting these licenses, and how long they may take to come to fruition. We then spoke about NDAs and the clauses involved.

Daniel then went on to speak about investment and ownership. This information is going hand in hand with our current deliverable (the product pitches).

You can protect yourself, your company, and your intellectual property from investors by not giving away more than 50% of the company. You can also add a ‘buy back’ clause into your NDA, and this would allow you to buy back shares at a fixed rate within a certain number of years of the deal.

I think the content that we learnt in this lecture could be really helpful in the future if I do decide to do some freelance work or have my own start-up