Seattle Intellectual Property Protection and Litigation Services

Safeguarding Your Business's IP Rights

Since your intellectual property rights are vital to your company’s competitive advantage, enforcing those rights can be critical to your success. At NWBizLaw, our Seattle intellectual property lawyers are here to use our extensive legal knowledge and resources to help business owners protect their intellectual properties from nefarious parties.

Understanding the Value of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is essentially the ownership of intangible ideas in a tangible form. Intellectual property includes the processes used to make:

• Products
• Logos
• Slogans

that brand businesses, and for some businesses, even the products themselves, such as in the case of music, film, or writing.

Though there is some inherent protection of some of these, there are ways to officially get your intellectual property registered with the United States as your own, such as getting:

• Trademarks
• Patents
• Copyrights

Additionally, you can choose to simply not tell anyone what your intellectual property is. This is called a trade secret. A famous example of a trade secret is KFC’s recipe for its fried chicken.

Benefits of Intellectual Property Litigation

If you’re a business owner and you’ve created something from your own head that’s integral to your business, wouldn’t you want to protect it at all costs? Further, if someone else were using your ideas to profit, wouldn’t you feel cheated? With the help of a litigation attorney, and with the IP law on your side, you could force them to stop their use of your ideas, for profit or otherwise. This encourages business owners to come up with ideas so they alone can profit on them… right?

Why Hire an Intellectual Property Litigation Lawyer?

Copyright law, trademark law, and trade secret law are undoubtedly complex. That is why you need an intellectual property lawyer who is skilled in IP litigation practice to help you navigate the course to a successful outcome. There is too much riding on the result of an intellectual property case not to find counsel that knows what to do to protect you. It’s important for you to proactively seek out offenders who are not respecting your intellectual property, and in the event that it goes to court, you want to know you have the odds in your favor.

When you need an intellectual property litigation attorney in Seattle, contact NWBizLaw online or call (206) 565-0090 for help!

Our Intellectual Property Litigation Services

We proudly take on the following cases that involve intellectual property litigation:

• Trademarks: Includes marks and insignia associated with products or services as established in commerce.
• Trade Secrets: We process strategies and items that are secret, are valuable because they are secret, and whose owner(s) take reasonable measures to protect the secrets thereof
• Copyrights: Protect original expressions of authorship, as recorded in tangible media of expression

Comprehensive Copyright Services

Copyrights are fundamental forms of intellectual property intended to protect authors’ creative works, including:

• Literary Works
• Visual Art
• Motion Pictures
• Musical Works
• Software Code

Although copyright law automatically gives you a property right for any original expressions that are “fixed” in a “tangible medium of expression” like paper, canvas, or MP4, protecting that right is a bit more involved. You must take certain steps to secure the full extent of copyright protection available under U.S. law.

Protecting Your Trade Secrets Effectively

Trade secrets are a type of intellectual property that the law protects even though it cannot be covered under copyright law or trademark law.

To qualify for trade secret protection, your “secret” must qualify for the following conditions:

• The information you wish to protect must be secret
• The information must be valuable because of its secrecy
• You must take reasonable measures to protect the secrecy of that information

Trade secrets vary from business to business, but essentially, they are a process you have developed that is crucial to your products or services. Examples of trade secrets are:

• Customer lists
• Special business methods (which are sometimes also patentable)
• Recipes

Because of the requirement to take reasonable steps to protect the secrecy of information, trade secrets are often tied to non-compete agreements or non-disclosure agreements.

If you have partners, a contract may need to be developed, or if one already exists, our intellectual property litigation attorney in Seattle offers contract reviews. These can make sure you’re getting a fair result out of the deal. Using a business attorney in this process means you’ll know what you’re agreeing to, which could save or make you a lot more money down the road.

Contact Our Seattle Legal Team for Assistance Today

Protecting the intellectual property you create in your business is integral to realizing the rewards of valuable ideas, as well as for the labor necessary to bring those ideas to fruition. By applying for copyrights and trademarks, you give yourself the best chance of controlling and benefiting from your business’s intellectual property over the long run.

Since your intellectual property rights are vital to your company’s competitive advantage, enforcing those rights can be critical to your success. By the same token, if you have been accused of infringing the intellectual rights of another person or company, you should expect a vigorous enforcement effort, and you will need a powerful defense.

To discuss your intellectual property matter, call our Seattle intellectual property lawyer at NWBizLaw today at (206) 565-0090 to request a consultation.