The products and brands you’ve never heard of!

I’m sure that based on the title of this article you were expecting an article about relatively unknown products or niche brands, but that’s not what I’ve written. Instead, this is an article about the value of intellectual property (IP) rights. By this, I mean that a great deal of the value of IP lies in what you never hear about.

Generally speaking, for granted patents, the owner has an exclusive legal right to prevent others from exploiting the patented invention without their consent. For registered designs, the owner has an exclusive legal right to make or sell the registered design. For registered trade marks, the owner has the exclusive legal right to prevent others from making unauthorised uses of the registered trade mark (e.g. brand name, product name, logo) or other signs that are similar to the registered trade mark, for the same or similar good or services.

This means that there are plenty of products and brands that none of us have ever heard of because they couldn’t launch as intended because someone else’s IP prevented them from doing so. An IP rights holder may never know the full value of their IP because they will never know how many launches didn’t go ahead because of their patent, trade mark or design.

If you are an owner of IP rights, it’s very likely that your IP rights are taking up time in the boardroom of your competitors. You can be confident that time and money will be spent by your competitors in trying to determine whether they can launch a product that works in a similar way to your patented invention, that looks similar to your registered design or that has a similar name to your product and for similar goods or services.

Some of these discussions will result in technical changes to your competitor’s product, so their product may not work quite as well as your product. Some of these discussions will result in name changes to your competitor’s product, so the name of their product isn’t quite as catchy as the name of your product. Some of these discussions will result in changes to the appearance of your competitor’s product, so their product doesn’t have quite the same appeal as your product, for example it might not look quite as ‘cool’ or as ‘luxurious’ as your product.

As you may be aware, patent applications disclose the technical details of an invention, and the content of the patent application is made publicly available 18 months after the earliest priority date. This leads to a question that we often get asked as patent attorneys: ‘why should I tell the whole world how my invention works?’. Our response is that patents are a trade off. In exchange for telling the world how your invention works, you receive a legal right to be the only one allowed to exploit the claimed invention for the lifetime of the patent (assuming renewal fees are paid).

Even if you are an owner who does not want to commercialise your invention yourself, this legal right can be transferred to other parties and can therefore be sold or licensed to make money. Having a granted patent can be commercially advantageous for other reasons too, such as improving your position when seeking investment.

So, if your IP rights sit on the Register once they’ve been granted, and you give them no more thought until the renewal fee time comes along, that means the system is working. If you haven’t had to enforce your patent, design or trade mark that’s because it’s providing the deterrent that’s intended to carve out your market space – that’s the value of IP.

Author: Phoebe Hunter

Please contact Phoebe if you have any questions.