Intellectual Property Basics for Small Businesses and Start-ups

You may not realize it, but if you own a business (or are thinking of starting one), you have (or will have) intellectual property assets that need legal protection! Do you have a business name or brand?  How about trade secrets such as price lists, customer lists, supplier lists, recipes, etc.?  Too often, business owners do nothing to protect these assets and then suffer the consequences when they are lost or stolen.   Equally damaging can be your ignorance of someone else’s intellectual property rights, resulting in the dreaded cease and desist letter (or worse!). This free workshop will review intellectual property assets such as trade secrets, trademarks, patents and copyrights and how they can be protected at a state and federal level.  We’ll walk you through the simple steps every business owner can take to register copyrights and trademarks and identify the different ways that a business may unknowingly infringe upon the property rights of other businesses. Workshop leader Patricia P. Werschulz is an intellectual property lawyer and a registered patent attorney.