Your questioned answered

Do my employees need to know about IP?

One of the biggest mistakes made by companies is not educating their employees about Intellectual Property. While the management and engineers of a company are the most important groups to keep educated on patents, other groups of people associated with the intellectual property of the company (e.g. technicians, sales staff, Admin staff) need to be educated also.

In addition to educating employees about what IP rights are, they should also be familiar with how to identify situations that are specifically related to IP, such as the creation of a new product, the suggestion of an improvement to a product by a customer or a potential infringement situation. If employees are not fully-educated on Intellectual Property, numerous patent rights may be lost and expensive mistakes can be made. For example, failure of employees to understand that a new improvement to a product would be patentable can result in the loss of foreign and domestic patent rights by the time the mistake is realised.

A range of IP training opportunities are available, often at little or no cost. Have a look at our events page or contact us on 01633 814708 for further details.

I have written a book with a colleague, who owns it?

Where two or more people have created a single work protected by copyright and the contribution of each author is not distinct from that of the other(s), those people are generally joint authors and joint first owners (although this might not apply where, for example, these people are employees).

Joint ownership might arise, for example, if a person was commissioned to create a website together with one of the company's employees. It is likely that both the person being commissioned, and the company, would be joint first owners of copyright in the website. If someone wanted to copy or use a work of joint ownership in some way, all of the owners would have to agree to such a request, otherwise an infringement of copyright could still occur.

On the other hand where individual contributions are distinct or separate, each person would be the author of the part they created for instance where the music and lyrics of a song are created by two different people. In these circumstances, if you wished to use just the lyrics you would only need the permission of the copyright owner of those, but copying of the whole song would obviously need the permission of the copyright owner of the music too.

Of course, ownership of copyright can be transferred, so where something is produced that has involved contributions from more than one person, it would be possible for copyright in all the material to be owned by one person as a result of appropriate transfers. Indeed, collaborators can agree in advance that copyright in what is to be produced should be owned by a single person or body. This could be helpful when permission needs to be given in the future. However, alternative solutions that might be equally helpful could involve all parties agreeing licensing arrangements in advance.