Navigating to the world of business is quite ambiguous. Not everyone has fully understood what it takes to grow the business and understand how intellectual property works. For many businesses, intellectual property secures more than just concepts or ideas; it also insures actual business assets, prevents unauthorized use of inventions, creations, and ideas, and grants one or more inventors exclusive rights.

Erin Austin, a consultant and a lawyer, will indulge us how the concept of intellectual property works and why it is important to understand it fully. She helps entrepreneurs to grow their business. Let's dive in, and listen to her today!

 
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Listen to the podcast here:

Intellectual Property Rights, Code and Implementations with Erin Austin
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about intellectual property. It’s a topic I think that a lot of people either overlook or don’t completely understand because it is a bit nebulous. Not everyone really understands when you come up with an idea or when you come up with a process, a product, even a logo or a company name, what it means to have that intellectual property, how that resonates with your business, and what you need to do to protect that for your business to operate properly. My guest today is all about intellectual property, Erin Austin. Her business is called Think Beyond IP and she helps anyone looking to grow their business to understand and navigate the world of intellectual property. And she also has a podcast called Hourly to Exit.

 
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Erin, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you so much. I’m very pleased to be here. Looking forward to this conversation.

 

Definitely. Thank you so much. I’ve wanted to talk with people about intellectual property for quite a while because it is something that people, they either overlook or don’t know how to wrap their heads around. What does intellectual property mean at its most basic level?

 

Great. So, first, I’m going to do my lawyer thing and I’m just going to say that what we’re going to talk about today is just information. There’s nuance to everything. Even if we talk about some examples, there’s always going to be something that’s different for everybody so we’re talking in generalities and if you do have specific questions, then you do need to consult with your own lawyer. With that out of the way.

 

Thanks for the caveat, there’s no one formula, you can just say, A plus B equals C, there’s always going to be something about your situation.

 

Absolutely, absolutely. Intellectual property, so, as you mentioned, there are four categories: copyright, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents. I will just say right off the top, patents is a very specific area of the law. I do not practice in it. We all are familiar with patents, probably. The pharmaceutical industry, obviously, they get patents on their medications and people who create inventions get patents on their inventions. I work with people in the expertise space and most of what their intellectual property would fall into the first three buckets: copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. Copyrights are things that are original and that have been put down in some concrete form, which also could be digital, so when you write something down, when you paint a painting, when you take a photograph, when you shoot a film, when you create blueprints, those original expressions, once you put them down in whatever the concrete form is, the copyright, meaning the exclusive right to make copies, distribute, create derivatives of that material belongs to the copyright owner.

 

Trademarks denote the origin of a good or service.Click To Tweet

 

So, whenever you see the trademarked golden arches of McDonald’s, you know that’s a McDonald’s. Whenever you see the trademarked brown color of a UPS truck, you know it’s a UPS truck.