Hot answers tagged intellectual-property
58
Ideas are useless. As you said, you "had no capital, no way of monetizing, and not too much exposure". You even admit to having stopped work on it over 18 months ago. Basically, this was a failed startup. It would be one thing if you at least had some interesting technology that would make them worth acquiring- but you don't.
So what exactly did google ...
16
What would your grounds for challenging be? They currently have a related product on the market with the same name as the one you plan to use in the future. Owning a domain name doesn't usually grant you any real protection or status. More importantly, and I say this as an attorney, why would you want to spend your startup money on litigation? If you haven't ...
15
Similar to tedivm's answer, ideas are a dime a dozen, it's all about the execution.
Unless you went to the extent of applying for grant of copyright, trademark, and/or patent there is not much recourse outside of having bragging rights that you came up with this concept in 2009 and that it was validated by Google's successful implementation.
My ...
15
Google+ is based heavily on work by Paul Adam who did the research for Google.
He also has a presentation called The Real Life Social Network for which he mentions where he got his info from here: http://www.thinkoutsidein.com/blog/2010/07/data-behind-real-life-social-network/
He also published a paper Communication mapping: understanding anyone's social ...
14
I'll take a contrarian approach. If 3 out of 4 founders say they don't value your future contributions, you should take a hard look in the mirror and ask why.
What parts exactly did you contribute? Are you a developer? I'd guess not. Designer? Marketing? If you were great at brainstorming the initial idea, but that's all you did in 5 weeks, then that's a ...
13
The short answer is NO!
Asking your investors to sign an NDA is impractical as most of them see dozens if not hundreds of ideas each years so they will never be able to manage their exposure if they have to sign an NDA for each idea they hear.
At the same time, asking an investor to sign an NDA is telling the investor that you are probably very concerned ...
11
You need to get professional legal advice. Find a local employment solicitor, well worth spending £100 or so to give you confidence when dealing with your board.
Having said that, I believe it depends both on what is in your contract and also on whether a court would deem the contract fair. As I understand it, contract clauses claiming IP to everything you ...
10
After doing some early research into patents, I concluded that:
it was going to cost me $10k or so per patent
it would be a huge amount of time and effort for me
it would take at least a couple of years for the patents to be granted
I wouldn't have the money to enforce them
small companies would probably ignore them anyway
So I was confident in asserting ...
10
Not a dumb question at all!
Technically logos are copyrighted so you need permission. Things like the Facebook "like" button typically come with permission as part of their Terms of Service, which you can find on their website.
Generally the TOS for any company will cover logo use, and generally they default to say "You cannot use it," simply because it's ...
10
From what I understand CA laws are pretty biased for the worker. If you did not agree to assign rights to the client then it is yours. You will probably want to work out an arrangement with the original client as they did subsidize the work, but that is just the way I would operate. I don't think you are legally obligated to do so.
I doubt they would ...
10
Pitching an idea to a company doesn't legally block it from telling you "it's a great idea, we'll implement it without you. goodbye".
If you could make them sign a paper saying anything you reveal in the meeting they cannot use unless they A,B & C.... that would be great - however, who in his right mind would sign something like that before hearing what ...
10
Your partner in coding would have joint copyright of the code. This does not mean he is directly entitled to a company that you start, but it does mean that he has a claim to the intellectual property you are trying to assign to the company. Therefore, he probably won't allow use of the code unless he gets some form of compensation, and equity is one them.
9
In general, you acquire trademark rights by use in commerce and not merely filing with the US Patent and Trademark Office. So those who are first to use, even if they have not filed to protect the same yet, have priority of rights in their marks (i.e. You!). If $350 is a lot of money for you right now, then I would hold off, otherwise go for it. It's my ...
9
I have this question quite a lot, the answer I usually come to is to have an escrow ... this means we place the source code with a third party (lawyer) every release or every 3 months.
If any of the "sunset" conditions are reached (like my company goes out of business, or the relationship breaks down) then the client gets the source code from the lawyer so ...
9
If you haven't talked to people about it, how do you know it will solve their problem?
Regarding someone "Stealing your idea", there's a couple of things you should consider:
If it's that easy to steal, it's going to get stolen the second you launch
Most people are more interested in their ideas than yours
If you thought of it, someone else has almost ...
8
Even if you were to get a patent ($5K-$10K investment), it wouldn't help you much. Are you really going to pay your legal team to fight their legal team?
The reality is, anyone with enough money and resources can always take any idea and implement it. There's no getting aound that, but the good news is... it probably won't happen.
And besides, I wouldn't ...
8
Guess I disagree with Frenchie. Or I may agree. Not quite sure.
If the idea lives only in your head, without validation or execution, I would say that its "value" approaches zero.
Consider the following:
You may have a great idea that can set a market on fire, but that's your opinion.
Objectively validating that idea within market segment(s) makes ...
7
This is a bad idea and something that is symptomatic of the thinking in companies pre-destined to fail before they even get started.
Unless you are going to sell this suicide pill as a product to developers (i.e. the suicide pill is the actual product you are going to sell and you have experience developing suicide pills and other similar poisons), focus ...
7
Let's say that yeah, someone at Google saw Jumpino and said, "Hey, that's a good idea." So they went to Andy Hertzfeld and the other guys at Google and said, "Look at this Jumpino thing. Think we can do it better?"
Well, that's what they did. And if this were the case, someone in Google's legal department did IP due diligence. When that turned up nil, ...
7
If I were him I would not assign it either.
One thing he can do is grant a non-transferable license that allows you/your company to use the framework but you can't modify, sell or re-assign that license or the framework to any other entity.
He should probably get compensation for that as well. For two reasons:
it is only fair
if it ever comes up ...
7
As you understand, you have basically two choices:
1) Reach an agreement that everyone can live with, although perhaps no one will like.
2) Leave without reaching an agreement.
The process of attempting to reach an agreement (negotiating) should clearly be your first step. Are you familiar with the concept of BATNA?
In negotiation theory, the best ...
6
This will sound like a cop-out answer, but I think you just shouldn't worry about it at all.
In all software companies, there's always the chance that another company will copy you, or beat you. Existing competitors can and will copy your good ideas. New competitors will appear.
Google or Microsoft or Amazon can do anything they want at any time, and ...
6
You need to be careful as to how you use any work that someone else has copyrighted but it appears that titles of books seem to be a little trickier that other works. This article over at Pub Law seems to say that titles are not protected as copyrighted material (Taken from Pub Law reference below):
"Copyright Office Regulations and judicial decisions have ...
6
Don't.
The truth of the matter is that the idea itself is not the object of value. As you've heard before, the long term execution is where the value lies. You could spend money and stress on drawing up an agreement, which is not enforceable for free, but that time is better spent working on the project.
The risk of somebody stealing the idea is less ...
6
In the U.S. you may claim a trademark by right of first use and using the "TM" identifier. Registration with the PTO is not required to claim a trademark, but it does give you a number of important additional legal rights and privileges including the right to use the ® symbol and ability to litigate a trademark dispute in federal court.
See the highly ...
6
The major milestones for you to track occur in the fifth and ninth year after your initial registration. Between the fifth and sixth year, you are required to file a “Section 8 Declaration of Continued Use” which is a sworn statement by the owner asserting that you are still using your trademark in commerce.
Alternatively, if you are not using your ...
6
You have a little misunderstanding. In very overall, hand-waving terms, copyright kind of corresponds to owning a piece of land. You get copyright on a book, a piece of software, music lyrics, etc. You obtain copyright automatically when you create the work. You should further mark the work as copyrighted, and have an appropriate license for its use in ...
6
Computer generated puzzles like Sudoku are not creative work and can not be covered by copyright. Thus is the prevailing opinion.
Or can they? The specific representation of the puzzle can be considered a creative process "fixed in medium" and is therefor covered. That is another opinion.
Like a patent, a copyright is only as good as someone capacity to ...
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