Kelly Burris: Intellectual Property

Kelly Burke brings up a very important topic in the business world that can be hard to understand and completely comprehend. If you have a unique product or service, or even a unique saying, to not get that copyrighted or a patent for it, you can lose your product, your business, even your livelihood. Businesses are always popping up, touting the new greatest thing, and if you don't have an exclusive license to sell the product that you're pushing, you have nothing. It is very similar to the gold rush in that sense - if you didn't stake the claim and have it registered, when someone else came in and started taking over, there was nothing that you could do about it because you hadn't gone through the correct channels and laid claim to your product from the beginning. This is essential in the business world today and while it is difficult to understand the full complexities of these, getting a trademark or a patent or a copyright is essential if you want to keep your business your own and bypass future trouble with someone else coming along and claiming what is yours. Where would Coca-Cola or Busch’s be today if their recipes for their products hadn’t been trade secrets and had simply leaked out? They wouldn’t be the corporations they are today and we’d have numerous companies with products following their recipes springing up every day and they would lose their individuality and uniqueness that makes them well-known and sought after. By following these guidelines, companies are ensuring that their product will remain their own and that they will be able to find a niche in the market that they can cultivate until something new comes along, which is inevitable in the advancing world today.

Entrepreneurs involved in importing goods must protect their intellectual property. A common problem entrepreneurs have encountered with outsourcing is “knockoffs.” It is important for business’ to do their homework when selecting suppliers in a foreign country. Some foreign manufactures see nothing wrong with copying a product for a company and sell their own version. It is crucial to have a formal contract that prohibits the illegal use of patents or trademarks in the source country and the U.S. The U.S. Patent and Trademark office has issued over 7 million patents, and it receives more than 400,000 new applications each year. Of the four broad categories mentioned, Copyright issues have recently flooded the news. With the advancement of technology, and the creation of the internet, a lot of violations have come up. For example, Napster was sued by many recording artists and labels for sharing copyrighted music for free. People have the access to download movies before they are out on video or even in the theaters. Students can copy others information to use as their own when doing research papers. Business ethics and personal morality play a huge role in this situation but governments have procedures in place to protect this type of activity.

Kelly Burris' job of protecting intellectual property is a very important one when it comes to new businesses and existing businesses. I think she gave clear explanations about the four categories of intellectual property. I believe that the most interesting of the four is the "trademark". I have followed the different lawsuits that Starbucks has had over their trademark since I am involved in the coffee industry. I also think the copyright protection is very important because people can steal so much today especially with the internet. I am surprised that she did mention cyberlaw.

How to protect your intellectual property can be complicated. There is a reason that we have lawyers for this. However as a business person it is important that you make an effort to familiarize yourself with this topic and learn some of the basic differences. There are many websites where you can post things, whether an object or literary work, and they have built in protection, but like Facebook you have to make sure that they are trying to protect the author of the work, not themselves. When you are doing business it is good to know what you need to protect and what you dont need to. Your ideas made reality through your hard work should be protected, otherwise someone could steal them from you. Keep in mind that this doesnt just apply to your own business ventures, as I said, make sure that you read the terms of service when using a site that you will be putting information or loading media onto. You need to be aware if that site is going to claim everything you put on it as their own and retain the rights to it. It is important to familiarize yourself so you can be savvy about it, and know what you are getting into.

Kelly Burris touches issues in this clip that addresses some of the major concerns that I have. Somethings that you right may spark ideas for others to reword your work and pose it off as if their own. This leads me to believe that copyrights and patents are the only secure aspect of protecting your work. Something so minor as an idea for a product could be taken by an individual and completed into a finished product if someone does not protect thier idea. After attending my ethics class at Eastern Michigan University, I have discovered though that things such as blogs become automatically protected once you post them. I pondered on this for several months before hearing that in class because I love to write poetry and post blogs on Myspace or Facebook. I was thrilled to learn that but even more thrilled that Burris addressed the issue.

Kelly Burris' job of shielding intellectual property is a very significant one when it comes to new businesses and existing businesses. We must be very careful in making decisions when it comes to business, so much more when now we are in recession. So far lot of people are out there looking for new job. There are many reasons to get a new job, like better pay or more interesting work. (You don't REALLY like writing copy and filling out TPS reports, admit it – nobody does. Thinking about it gives me narcolepsy.) Or it could be you are about to lose your job or quit your job, and don't want to get short-term loans to float you. Being an unplaced worker isn't a pleasant place to be in. It beats having to get online payday loans if you have a new job already lined up. Remember in this world there is nothing comes for free.

Hello, my name is Jessica and I am a senior at Eastern Michigan University. In many of my business classes we have learned a lot about the importance of protecting products and technology through copy rights, trade marks and patents. It is true that if you don’t have one of those protecting your company then you have nothing. In today’s day and age, it is equally important to protect the technology that helps create your product or service. Other companies that can get a hold of that kind of knowledge are going to be a nightmare for the company they took it from. I have been creating a business plan for an entrepreneur class that I am taking and trademarks are apart of my plan. This business plan hits close to home because it is an actual business that I started a few years ago. It is no longer going partly because I started school and didn’t have time to expand on it but if I did, a trademark would have been the first protection I would have put in place.

I found Kelly Burris’ discussion of protecting intellectual property both educating and a necessary tool for businesses to retain their competitive creations. Kelly Burris, an intellectual property attorney, discusses the importance of securing and protecting valuable intellectual property business assets through tools such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Patents would cover items such as inventions; trademarks protect brand identifier words, symbols, designs, names, and logos like the “Whopper” for Burger King or the infamous golden arches found on the McDonald’s sign; copyrights protect authorship such as books, songs, movies, and artwork (but only in the form it was expressed, not the idea itself); and trade secrets protect confidential items such as famous recipes. Without protection of your inventions, ideas, and namesakes they can easily be acquired by the competitor before you even have a chance to launch it; these tools act as safety deposit boxes for a business’s competitive creations. Currently there are 1.5 million trademarks registered in the United States, 900,000 are currently being used. To further a company’s authentic protection, many corporations will create a trade secret policy and put it in writing, this is the company’s Trade Secret Protection Policy which an IP attorney can aid in executing. Some businesses may have new employees sign a contract regarding the safety of trade secrets, this contractual agreement disables the employee from discussing or sharing “top secret” company information legally with anyone especially competitors. Patenting their product paid off for Louis Vuitton in 2008 when the upscale designer wins a dispute against a French retailer manufacturing knock-off products; a hotel in Bejing, China also suffers charges as they rented space to the fraudulent French retailer who sold the merchandise in their hotel.

The importance of intellectual property is often understated in many organizations. Kelly Burris covers all of these different types of intellectual property quickly and accurately. As is mentioned in the lecture, the copyright is the easiest to obtain so it is also the most prevalent. Copyrights are useful in that they can protect a wide variety of types of property from print media to lines of code in a computer program. Copyrights are often violated by people using protected media without paying for the right. Patents are harder to come by and more limited in scope. They cover the way something looks, the way it's made or specific plant life. They are also less often violated but still necessary. Trademarks are used to protect the value provided by brand names. An example is the acronym WWF used by the World Wildlife Fund. The same acronym was used by the World Wrestling Federation despite the trademark used by the World Wildlife Fund. The World Wrestling Federation was ultimately forced to change its name. Finally trade secrets involve protecting processes or recipes that are used to give a business a competitive advantage over others. This could be anything from the way Volvo performs a safety audit to the ingredients Dunkin Donuts uses to make its donuts. In most countries, these types of intellectual property protections extend across borders. The Berne Convention signatory countries all respect the property rights of each other, and this includes the wide majority of the world. That is a great indicator of how important intellectual property rights are to the world economy. Michael Moore