Your business’s intellectual property includes trademarked words or symbols, copyrighted works, and patented inventions. You can protect these types of intellectual property by filing applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and U.S. Copyright Office. There’s another category of intellectual property that is more difficult to protect: trade secrets. Your best line of defense for protecting all of your valuable intellectual property is to have ironclad Cyber Liability Coverage in place.
What are Trade Secrets?
The first step in identifying how to protect your intellectual property is understanding exactly what that intellectual property is. Identifying your trademarked, copyrighted, and patented information is easy. But what about your trade secrets? Whether your business is a law firm, hair salon, hotel, restaurant, construction company, or medical office, you have trade secrets. Examples of trade secrets include recipes, software programs, customer lists, research findings, manufacturing processes, and more. A trade secret is anything that gives you a competitive edge, but doesn’t qualify for trademark, copyright, or patent protection.
Protect Your Trade Secrets
Once you identify the proprietary information that give your business an edge of your competitors, the things that you absolutely would not want your competitors to have access to, have an attorney draft a confidentiality contract protect that information. Do not share your trade secrets with any employee, vendor, or business associate without first having those people sign a confidentiality agreement. Additionally, take steps to physically secure your proprietary information and implement complex cyber security measures to protect it from online theft.
Intellectual property theft is pervasive and, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, costs U.S. businesses billions of dollars per year. Contact us today at Newman Crane & Associates Insurance, (407) 859-3691. We will craft a comprehensive cyber liability policy to protect your business from attempts to steal your intellectual property.