If you have intellectual property, here are six reasons why you should protect it. One way of doing this is by web scraping to monitor and find out any potential threats online. Learn more about this here.
What Is Intellectual Property
Intellectual property refers to a category of property that involves a business entity’s creations, organization, or individual. Intellectual property can be symbols, designs, names, images, and other literary or artistic works.
Here are the most common ways a business or an individual can protect their intellectual property:
- Copyright: It’s a form of Intellectual Property protection given to authors for their literary, musical, artistic, dramatic, and other forms of published or unpublished intellectual works
- Patent: It’s given to inventors to grant them the right of property to their inventions. Patents are approved for new, unique, and valuable inventions 20 years from the patent application’s filing date. A patent protects a design from being reproduced or exploited
- Trademark: It refers to any phrase, word, design, symbol, or combination of these elements that identify an owner’s service or product that distinguishes it from its industry counterparts
- Trade Secret: It can include a pattern, compilation, formula, method, program, device, process, or technique utilized in one’s company. A trade secret typically carries an independent industry value that gives a business entity an edge over its competitors
Six Reasons Why Intellectual Property Should Be Protected
Below is a rundown of the biggest reasons businesses and individuals such as artists, inventors should have their Intellectual Property protected.
1. Safeguard Business Ideas
Protecting your Intellectual Property equates to protecting your business ideas from being stolen by an individual or group so that they can take advantage of it for their benefit.
By having reliable Intellectual Property protection, you can have your much-needed peace of mind, knowing that you and your team’s ideas are not leaked or leveraged by other people who do not belong to your company.
2. Foster Business Growth
Having extensive Intellectual Property protection allows you to increase your business’s prosperity further. Intellectual Property protection is critical to both small and large companies.
Moreover, suppose you have a reasonably small startup business, and your business is thriving through your unique products or services. In that case, you need to have your Intellectual Property protected. Having your ideas and products reproduced can heavily affect your profitability and market standing as a small business.
3. Avoid Product Counterfeiting
Counterfeiting is one of the most significant challenges when talking about Intellectual Property. Nowadays, product counterfeiting is widespread and all over the global market.
Having your products counterfeited by other businesses can heavily affect your sales as well as the integrity of your brand. Therefore, you must invest in your business’s Intellectual Property protection.
4. Protect Brand Reputation
Having your business ideas stolen and your products reproduced can heavily affect your brand’s name in the industry. These scenarios can lead your customers to stop buying from you and believe the cheaper version of your product instead.
Additionally, your business partners and investors may start to doubt your brand’s integrity, as counterfeiting is not a good look for your business.
5. Avoid Expensive Legal Process
If your Intellectual Property is not legally protected and someone creates a copy of your product or utilizes your intellectual works without your permission, suing them would result in a very long and expensive legal process.
Therefore, to prevent other groups or individuals from taking advantage of your works, you must have reliable protection for your Intellectual Property right off the bat.
6. Prevent Brandjacking
Brandjacking is a process that involves someone assuming or acquiring your company or personal identity to collect your equities illegally. This activity could also affect the act of someone using you or your brand’s trademark unlawfully.
Web Scraping to Monitor and Detect Intellectual Property Threats Online
A web scraping tool allows you to collect extensive data, enabling you to see the possible threats to your Intellectual Property. By having the ability to monitor data and see the risks at hand, you will develop the right solutions to manage them efficiently.
Web scrapers provide you with the capability to gather information across various e-commerce sites worldwide and see if there are any knock-off versions of your products. Such a tool also allows you to monitor social media channels and online ad campaigns to detect counterfeiting or brand infringement cases.
Depending on the needs of your business, you may build an in-house web scraper and use proxies or choose a ready-to-use web scraper. If you are to develop your tool, one of the methods to consider is Python web scraping.
Python is one of the easiest programming languages, containing useful tools and libraries to make scraping data simple. Due to this reason, Python web scraping is among the most popular ways to collect data from websites.
Conclusion
Whether you are running an established enterprise or a small startup venture, having reliable Intellectual Property protection is undeniably one of the business matters you need to prioritize from the get-go. Doing so allows you to reap the benefits of your and your team’s hard work.
