Protecting My IP

My company assists small business owners, specifically in-home family daycares, to better manage and automate the processes in their daycare with the use of technology. As with starting any business venture, one thing to think about is intellectual property and how I, as a owner of this IP am going to protect it.

IP is an extremely valuable resource in today’s market. So significant, that some larger companies have even bought smaller companies just so that they can have access to their IP and use it as their own. Owning the rights to a certain process, a specific character, or even a recipe is the reason some companies are able to maintain their success for so long without being ripped off. It becomes very easy to see how intellectual property can make or break a business, which is why protecting it is so critical.

For my business, I plan to use two of the four methods to protect my IP that we discussed in class. First and most importantly, we will be copyrighting all our code and any technologies we develop in an effort to accomplish our main goal of online daycare management. Secondly, eventually we will have a logo that represents our brand and that will be used on all of our marketing material, online or on paper. For this reason, we need to protect our logo and brand name. To accomplish this, we will trademark our logo.  Then over time, we plan to market ourselves well and slowly establish ourselves in the industry.