Publications for Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks and Intellectual Property

Intellectual property (“IP”) rights can be the cornerstone of a business's value and competitive edge. IP rights are generally grouped into four categories: trademarks, copyrights, patents, and trade secrets. 

Noncompetition agreements typically prohibit an employee or seller of a business to own or work for a competitor of the protected party, and often are of substantial value. However, a Michigan court will only enforce these agreements if they comply with the following four requirements.

If your company is considering a merger, acquisition or internal corporate restructuring, it is important that intellectual property contracts (such as software licenses) be carefully reviewed to determine if the merger may have an effect on the surviving company’s ability to use the software or other intellectual property.

Although this has not historically been the case, it has been over 10 years since the patent office started to allow software companies to file patents on their software inventions.

The ultimate goal of trademark protection is to avoid consumer confusion.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) refers to software capable of creating "live" virtual three-dimensional, "intelligent" parametric models.

Facebook, the leading social networking website, is now allowing users to register their own personalized Facebook URL (web address) by selecting a unique "username" for their Facebook profile page.

Intellectual Property rights are commercially valuable products of the human mind and include copyrightable works, trademarks, patentable inventions and trade secrets.