Protecting Intellectual Property | Essay

Running head: PROTECTING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
PROTECTING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
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1PROTECTING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Intellectual property consists of wide range of legally-protected rights that include
patents, trademarks, designs, copyrights, patents and many more forms of intangible assets
such as goodwill, contract rights and human capital. The risks that the branch can face can be
considered from two different perspectives, one from the first party intellectual property
ownership perspective and the third party intellectual property infringement liability
perspective. From the perspective of first party, the various risks include legal costs of
protection and enforcement of the intellectual property rights and decreased value of
intellectual property as an asset and from the third party perspective, the risks can be legal
costs required to defend a certain intellectual property, resulting settlement or damages costs,
design-around costs and many more [1]. The risks in this scenario can be keeping the trade
secrets relevant during the whole process of research and development. Leakage of trade
secrets can be beneficial to the competitors of the firm. The company in its domain of
research and development can be targets of patent infringement lawsuits.
The various risks for which SolarX’s new branch might lose IP in Research and
Development are as follows:
1. Availability risks- The existing branch of the company has to provide informations
available to the new branch and this can be risky as the new staffs there can misplace theses
informations or mishandle these.
2. Compliance risk- The new branch of SolarX needs to be well aware of the legal issues that
are pertaining to the IP rights and if they are not aware of the legal implications they can be
in trouble for violating these IP rights [2].
3. Brand risk- The new branch can hamper the most important asset of the company that is
the brand name if it takes hasty decisions in the sphere of research and development.

2PROTECTING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
4. Access risk- Access risk includes those risks that are related to the access of informations
or maybe those which are inappropriately granted or sometimes refused.
5. Business value- This is another important aspect and the new branch can hamper the
business value if it comes up with irrelevant research and development. Thus it is necessary
that a certain firm’s IP is kept track of [3].
The relevant internal bodies in case of the availability risk are the management such
as the board of directors and manager. The vital informations are kept with higher officials in
a company and mainly the managers handle these. Thus when sensitive informations are
being passed onto to the new branch then it can be said to be as the responsibility of these
people to take care that these do not go to wrong hands. In research and development the
company needs to refer to different sources and find out certain important things that can be
considered as new developments but in this process it needs to be well aware of the
compliance risks. In this case the internal bodies are both the IT officials of the existing
branch and the new branch of the company [4]. The chief information officer and the IT head
are some of the internal stakeholders. In case of the remaining three risks the entire workforce
is relevant. SolarX can protect its current R&D advancements by ensuring that it IP are well
protected. The main branch can create confidentiality and licensing contracts for the new
employees in the new branch and other partners. Proper security measures such as setting up
password protection for all computer networks, encrypting data, usage of virtual private
network access and establishing Wi-Fi Protected Access2 and many more such measures [5].
The company should avoid joint ownership as this grants permission to more than one party
to the copyright, patent and trademark.
In order to protect Research and Development of the new branch of SolarX some
steps can be taken that are as follows: