Intellectual Property
Intellectual property rights are critical assets of any business and part of its value, so they need to be identified, registered and protected.
Practice lead: Ian Rosenfeld
We can help with:
Rigby Cooke Lawyers has over 35 years of experience working with clients in these areas of law and can help you develop a legal framework to protect your business and its intellectual property assets.
Unfortunately there are many “myths” about intellectual property:
- We have registered our business name and company name so it must be safe to use and no one else can use it – unfortunately false.
- We have engaged our graphic designer to prepare our webpages, logo and brochure so we own it all – unfortunately probably false.
- We bought this branded product for distribution in Australia from the Asian distributor so it must be legal – unfortunately false.
- If my manager leaves, he can’t use any information about our business, so we are safe – unfortunately false.
Our lawyers can guide you through the full IP cycle, from developing and commercialising intellectual property, to when your intellectual property has been infringed, and if someone else claims that you have infringed their intellectual property rights.
Our services
We can help you with:
- registering and protecting trade marks, including assessing whether a trade mark can be registered or even used
- trade mark opposition proceedings
- certification trade marks
- parallel imports
- branding issues – from logo design, word usage, colour, and more recently, sound and smell – and what can be protected
- dealing with intellectual property infringement or threatened legal proceeding, including misleading and deceptive conduct and passing off issues
- sale and assignment of intellectual property
- commercialisation and licensing of intellectual property
- all aspects of copyright, including publishing and licensing arrangements, and protecting content published in different formats, including online
- identifying and protecting confidential business information through employee, supplier, business partner, funding or other commercial agreements, including Non-Disclosure Agreements
- domain name disputes and transactions
- software and IT agreements