John Battersby, Partner

"The main 6 IP rights that we're working with day to day with our clients are things like trade marks. Trade marks acts as a badge of origin to protect the brand. It helps consumers differentiate your products and services from your competitors. Various things function as trade marks, so say the name: ‘Nike’, slogans like 'Just Do It' or even the Nike tick.

The second one is copyright, this is a very common right - it arises naturally, very relevant to cultural, media, creative, software industries. An example of copyright would be the photographs you take on your phone; you’re the author and owner of first copyright. The music you listen to on the phone, the owner of copyright would be the artist that created it and there may also be rights and sound recordings that the recording studios created. 

Rights and designs: they protect the overall appearance of a product or a design. A good example of this would be there’s a registered design for the Trunki suitcase that kids ride around on in airports. There’s also registered designs for the overall appearance of the Apple iPad. 

Patents: protect the technical innovation of a product or process. A good example of a patent would be when you use your facial recognition software on your iPhone, they’re also very applicable to machinery and mechanical examples of patents.

Confidential information: As the name suggests that helps keep information with a necessary quality of confidence away from the public domain to keep it in your business without it being disclosed. This could be trade-secrets, an example of a trade secret would be the Coca Cola recipe. There may also be, in your business, valuable lists of customers or clients that you want to keep confidential and you don’t want your competitors to find out about.

Database rights: database rights are becoming more and more prevalent as the use of data is growing exponentially and becoming extremely valuable to businesses up and down the country.

Those are the main 6 Intellectual Property rights that are relevant to most businesses in the UK. We work day-to-day with our clients to help them identify which of those rights are most relevant. Once we’ve identified them, we’ll help them develop and monetise those rights and also help them protect those rights if necessary."