Managing Intellectual Property
If someone asked a sizeable charity what its key asset was, the charity might say its reputation or ‘brand', the goodwill it enjoyed with the public. But do charities actually take steps to protect all intellectual property rights they may have - and equally to ensure they do not infringe the rights of others? Maybe not, until things start to go wrong or perhaps when charities are in the process of merging.
What rights are we talking about? These fall into two main types - ‘registered', where you have to take some positive action to acquire them (patents, trademarks and regulated design) - and ‘unregistered', which you get automatically, such as copyright, database rights and confidential information.
Which rights are likely to be of most importance to charities? Possibly not patents, unless charities are engaged in medical or other research. But certainly copyright in their literature, trademarks for logos and names and database rights for information a charity may painstakingly compile (for example details of major donors).
As well as failing to preserve their own assets, charities may unwittingly infringe the rights of others. What if a charity used photographs from the internet on its own website without checking whether or not they were copyright free? What if a charity's day centre just played recorded music for the benefit of its users?
Top tips?
- 1. Make sure your contracts of employment and of volunteering are clear about what information is confidential and the staff and volunteers know their contractual obligations and possible consequences of computer misuse.
- 2. Check the position with regard to licences for software you use. A licence could be 20 years old but if you're still using the old software but on a newer computer you could be fighting a bill of hundreds of thousands of pounds in outstanding licence fees - this has happened.
- 3. If you have corporate partners, make sure that in your contracts they agree not to undermine your reputation and that if they do then you can end the contract straightaway.
- 4. Consider inserting booby traps and redundant features into your database as a matter of course to help identify infringements quickly. If your grandmother suddenly starts receiving communications from another organisation you know your customer database has been copied and, most importantly, you can prove it!