You have just come up with a brilliant idea and you want to go about making it a reality. You know that you will have to patent your idea, but you may not know exactly what patenting a product entails. To have a good chance of getting your product approved, remember to provide detailed documentation of your idea. Don’t talk about your idea to anyone, save for one or two people who will function as witnesses. Do your research to make sure that your invention is indeed an original one, and find out how much it will cost you to make a prototype.
Documentation .. The most important action to protect an idea
In general, when starting any startup company in any country in the world you will need legal advice to register it legally to be allowed to operate in your local and international market. Whether your startup company offers a realistic product or service, or it provides virtual services via smartphones, or even is responsible for producing games for smartphones. Any company of any kind needs legal procedures to register it in the country.
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If your idea is a commercial nature, Trademark registration is the natural procedure you should take.
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In the midst of your founding of the company, and in order to protect the idea from theft by others, you will need to differentiate between three basic forms of Intellectual Property: Patent, Trademark, and copyright for publishing or "licensing the content" ( Copyright). If the idea behind your startup is based on a new invention or a new unknown technology, then in this case it is necessary to register it as a patent. A patent in general pertains to useful indigenous techniques, such as machine development, technology, or some scientific or research innovation. Rather, it comes to commercial methods and patterns that are protected as a "business method patent". In short, registering a patent pertains to an unprecedented innovation in a machine, industry, or new concept that guarantees its protection from theft or exploitation from any institution without returning to you as you are the owner of this innovation.
If your idea is of a commercial nature, then Trademark registration is the natural procedure that you must take, considering that the trademark is the first slogan that tells consumers about the quality of the company and the service it provides. For example Coca-Cola for drinks, or McDonald's for fast food and more. The trademark includes the name, symbol, device, letter or any logo you intend to use. In other words, it is the brand that distinguishes your corporate identity from other companies in the markets that provide the same service or product. Finally, if your startup is mainly engaged in producing certain content, whether it is in literature, drama, Internet content, lyric or musical content, movies, radio programs, scenarios, plays, words, and all other activities that fall under the name of “content”, then it is registered as property rights Intellectual (Copyright) gives you as the owner of this content the right to immunize it and attribute it to yourself only, and to sue any other party that uses this content for commercial or technical purposes without reference to you.
The details are not for anyone
While working on your project, it is imperative that you be exposed to situations in which you explain some details about it, whether when you are presenting your project to investors or sharing its details with other employees or with potential partners. In the end, as long as you keep all the details of your project with you, you do not need to be concerned no matter how you highlight some of the "main" details for others as general ideas that keep tools for implementing them for yourself or when formal and reliable contracts are signed that allow you to share all the details with other parties without worry.
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Some who are enthusiastic about the ideas of their entrepreneurial projects, tend to mention all the details of any listener to their ideas, perhaps because they feel happy.
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If it is necessary to speak with deep details, to come out of it in the interest of your company, then it is your duty then to speak with the details. But if the “other” who asks you to explain to him the idea of your project in detail is a person or entity completely unknown to you or is unlikely to provide you with real help, or even a person / entity that you know does not have sufficient tools to participate in your project well. Perhaps less detailing is useful in these situations, with no general key ideas.
Target experts and reputables
One of the most important necessities for securing ideas is that the entrepreneur aims to cooperate with people and institutions of good reputation, whether in the quality of business or honesty in dealing with ideas. There will come a time that will require you to cooperate with "Outsource" to design your website or design an application on smartphones, that includes the most accurate details of your project from A to Z, or the use of a team of technicians and consultants who will be involved with in the implementation of the project, either as part of the recruitment team Or as an external consultant.
Before starting to implement this cooperation, it is necessary for you to study well all the parties that you will cooperate with, starting from the investor or business incubator, through developers and site and application designers, and not ending with the independent individuals who you will deal with as a third party who will accomplish some of the tasks in your plan Executive. The study of these parties will be by extensive research on their previous work, their reputation in the market, their professionalism, and reading the reviews of the clients they have dealt with previously. And the more these institutions / people become more famous in the field of business, you are supposed to feel more confident about them because they are driven all the time by maintaining their reputation and professionalism in a way that reduces the opportunities of their employees by seeking to capture the ideas of clients or their collaborators.
Using Non-Disclosure Agreements
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Hire a lawyer to draft your NDA if your idea is extremely valuable. © wikiHow
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A Non-Disclosure Agreement or for short NDA, it is a legal contract between you as an entrepreneur and the funding agency or investors that defines a legal framework for dealing with your submitted project, because what is stated in it is confidential, and cannot be disclosed to any third party. Certainly, it cannot be used from the second party without referring to the first party.
However, an agreement to maintain confidentiality can be agreed upon either while submitting the executive summary of the project as one of the conditions of the agreement, and it may be included during project discussions. In many cases, it is waived on the basis of a respected verbal and tacit agreement in which the funding parties undertake not to use the details of the idea if the project funding is refused on its part. In short, it is up to negotiation and not a routine procedure that should be taken with everyone.
In the end, there are no fully protected ideas. Ideas in the business world will always be found on the road. More important than the idea is the way to implement this idea and transform it from just a fictional obsession that entices you into a realistic thing that achieves profits and enters the system of production and consumption. And always the best way to protect ideas is to work to implement them quickly and correctly, rather than exaggerating them and showing them for fear of stealing them. Another person might have succeeded in implementing an idea similar to yours, because it was more rapid and bold!
References:
- https://www.gov.uk/set-up-business
- https://www.workindenmark.dk/Working-in-DK/Start-your-own-business
- https://www.wikihow.com/Protect-an-Idea-from-Theft