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03-July-2007
Knowing how to protect your rights
The UK Intellectual Property Office has recently published the results of an Intellectual Property (IP) awareness survey carried out in conjunction with Oxford University. This is the largest IP awareness survey in the UK to date and aims to give an accurate indication of the state of IP awareness in the UK across all sizes of firm and all sectors of industry.
The results tend to show that, while there are high levels of innovation within UK industry, there is generally a lack of sufficient knowledge about the system of protecting that innovation by the use of IP rights.
That lack of awareness is most pronounced in small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of between 10 and 250 employees, and micro-enterprises of up to 9 employees. Yet at the same time, the research showed that due to their sheer numbers, micro-enterprises contribute more innovative new products and services to the market than any other category of firm.
By way of example, only 11.2% of micro-enterprises and 18.4% of SMEs knew that publishing details of an invention before filing for a patent would invalidate the application for that patent. Furthermore, around 30% of firms in both the micro-enterprises and SME categories either did not know that an application was necessary to obtain patent protection or positively asserted that an application was not necessary.
Even where respondents were able to identify innovation within their companies, they were often unsure about which IP rights to use to best protect it, and how to go about doing that. Clearly such lack of knowledge is likely to result in innovative products failing to receive the monopoly protection that they are entitled to, and which could significantly boost the success and revenue-making ability of those products.
This should be of concern to both the government and UK industry generally as it is the ability of small, growing companies to develop successful products and services, protected by appropriate IP rights, which will create the large firms of the future who are capable of competing on the world stage.
The survey also found that, whilst larger companies are generally more IP aware, there can be enormous discrepancies of IP awareness within such companies. Only 34% of companies with 250+ employees have an overall IP policy and of these only 46% distribute such policies to their staff. As little as 23% of large firms provide IP-specific training for their staff. This failure to accurately disseminate IP knowledge throughout large organisations can prejudice the acquisition and/or retention of valuable IP rights within the organisation, especially on the sale of businesses or companies from group structure.
It is therefore clear that the vast majority of firms can benefit from further knowledge of the UK IP system and how it can be used to their benefit, not only in terms of identifying and (where applicable) registering rights that may exist within the organisation, but also in creating an internal system of management of those IP rights, and getting advice on how to exploit and protect those rights so as to extract maximum commercial benefit from them. The first step in doing this for your firm could be a fixed-price audit of your IP rights by Levi Solicitors. Contact James Sarjantson on 0113 297 3181 for more information.
ENDS
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