Graeme Wilson
Intellectual Property

Like many lawyers, after my degree, I did articles, which are kind of like an internship or training. I spent a hell of a lot of time representing people in court, which can be quite unusual, but I was at a small legal practice and we just kind of did everything.

Intellectual Property (IP) is quite difficult to define in the sense that it's all-encompassing. Some of that can be tangible IP, in the sense that it can actually be registered and protected, and some IP is intangible, so it's things like know-how, methodology, way of doing things - what businesses may regard as their secret source.

Protecting IP can be quite tricky because you need to understand what it is that you're protecting. And I think, right from the outset, the important thing to bear in mind is an idea alone is not worth anything.

The first and easiest thing to talk about is copyright. You don't have to register a copyright. A copyright comes into existence as a matter of law, as soon as you create something.

A trademark is where you create a distinctive identity around your product or service.

If you have a specific design of a product of yours, you can get protection for that.

With respect to the lack of your categories of IP that you can protect in terms of law - your trademarks, your designs and your patents - an important thing to be aware of is that they're country-specific.

So I think the first thing to do is to try and seek the protection that you can get. A simple step would be making sure that you actually put a little copyright note or logo on everything it is that you are creating that actually identifies and shows your ownership of it.

I think it's important to understand that a company registration or a domain name registration does not give you brand protection in the sense that a trademark would.

From an IP enforcement perspective, if it's a copyright that's been infringed, you can enforce your copyright.