Week 6: Bridge2 — Patent Trolls
How do we protect our IP?
Exploring startup value creation and intellectual property.
How does a startup create shareholder value? I would offer the following three ways as a start to the conversation:
Growth - Accounts
Growth - Revenue
Intellectual Property (IP)
While we’ve already talked about growth through innovation and market fit, we haven’t yet hit how a company might create value.
Here are my cliff notes on the differences between the types of IP.
Patents
You can only patent something tangible; code is not a candidate.
Patents are public and cost $$ for only 20 years.
Trademarks
Add TM to any logo to protect usage during the application process.
TM is free.
® is only for logos that have gone through the US Trademark process and received a Registered Trademark certificate.
Registered Trademark - ® costs $.
Copyrights
Copyright is owned by the one who rights it when writing it… Code, picture, words.
The code can be copyrighted but can’t be changed (not a good use of time).
Websites should be copyrighted; use the © sign with year in the footer.
Pursuing © via US Copyright costs $ and is only suitable for art, books, and publications that can be copied and sold.
It covers 70 years past the life of the person who created the copyright.
Trade Secrets
The best option for code is to ensure development teams and design teams have NDA.
The best option for recipes is a proper NDA with your employees.
NDAs and Contract language are essential. Please be careful in collecting these things from employees and contractors.
We’ve begun pursuing a ® trademark on the word Barista Bot and the mark (shown below), and the journey has been enlightening on the Trademark process.
We haven’t hit any barriers on the mark, only the caveat that it is best to Trademark the mark in monochrome instead of any specific color. Using a color restricts your coverage while using monochrome allows for any color combination on the background — as the black mark is what is protected.
As we pursued trademarking Barista Bot, we found the combination of words to be descriptive; that is, we found “Barista” and “Bot” are general words describing specific things, and putting them together is not novel or unique enough to warrant a Trademark. With a quick search in Google, you’ll find a handful of Barista Bots doing mostly autonomous robot things. So, while we are pursuing the trademark for conversational text ordering, which differs from a robot barista making you coffee drinks… the blocker is the same: too descriptive.
So, we won’t pursue a trademark on our product, Barista Bot, but will seek one on our LLC name, Espresso + Milk, which seems novel and unique enough for consideration.
Next up is filing the trademark with USPTO and getting into the review queue, listing a 14-month timeframe from submission to potential registration.