A reporter asked me: what is the significance of the establishment of the intellectual property court and Shanghai's adoption of the opinions on accelerating the construction of a scientific and technological innovation center with global influence to small and medium-sized enterprises? I replied: the two things lead to the same conclusion. The most significant is to enhance the awareness of intellectual property rights of the whole society, guide small and medium-sized enterprises to build up competition barriers with intellectual property rights, and avoid infringing others' intellectual property rights. The state determines the policy orientation, but specific to each enterprise, it should proceed from their own situation, play the card of intellectual property rights in daily operation, it is best to become the wind breeze of innovation "pig". Today, I would like to talk with you about how to do a good job in intellectual property rights of small and medium-sized enterprises.

I. how can smes apply for external intellectual property rights?

The essence of intellectual property is intangible assets. As an enterprise, it should make some concrete efforts to fix these intangible assets as its own rights. Specifically, even if the application for patents, trademarks and copyright registration. For different start-ups, the type of focus is different. Enterprises can be divided into r&d enterprises, manufacturing enterprises, sales enterprises and service enterprises. For different enterprises, the types of intellectual property that need to be protected are also different. As a business owner, to protect your intellectual property, you must first think about what your core competitive advantage is, and then address the specific problem that your core intellectual property needs to protect.

For manufacturing start-ups, patents and trademarks matter. If the enterprise's technology is original, others do not have, should apply for patent protection, after obtaining the patent right, the enterprise can establish a barrier to competition, if there is a peer copy of the enterprise's technology, can use the patent right to attack the competitors. Similarly, trademark right is very important for manufacturing enterprises, especially those with low technical barriers and homogeneous product competition. Because trademark protects the brand, brand can make the products of enterprises establish identification among consumers, and enable consumers to distinguish the products of start-ups from those of other enterprises. If someone wants to copy your brand, may face trademark infringement, serious is to bear criminal responsibility.

For creative enterprises and traditional software enterprises, according to the author's service experience, copyright is obviously more important to them. Is content of copyright protection, the traditional software companies and the creative class enterprise's product or service is the external expression of products containing copyright, such as movies, music, software, literature, the core of the products is content, and the age of the Internet, copy the contents of the technical difficulty is greatly reduced, ordinary people through the computer to copy paste can spread any copyrighted works easily, therefore, for content production enterprises, how to protect their own content, without permission of the spread and replicate behavior has become a matter of life and death. Before cracking down on infringement, one should have the right first, which is copyright. According to the copyright law, copyright is protected from the date of creation, but necessary registration can make it easier for copyright owners to prove the ownership of rights. Therefore, copyright registration is also very important for traditional software enterprises and creative enterprises.

2. How can start-ups improve the internal performance of intellectual property?

It is very important to apply for external intellectual property rights, but this is not the focus of this article. As an intellectual property lawyer, I believe that the construction of internal intellectual property rights ignored by most enterprises is the real focus of intellectual property protection. In short, there will be a lot of original achievements in the daily operation of enterprises. Enterprises should establish their intellectual property rights over these achievements as soon as possible. It is very important for enterprises and employees to sign three agreements and establish relevant systems.

1. Ownership agreement of job achievements.

The purpose of this agreement is to determine the ownership -- ownership -- of the content created by employees during their employment in the company for the performance of their duties. If the achievement is technical, the patent application right shall belong to the enterprise; if the achievement is of various contents, the copyright of the content shall belong to the enterprise; if the achievement is of brand, the trademark application right shall belong to the enterprise. A big problem of start-up enterprises is that they are easy to split. Many enterprises encounter the situation that internal employees leave with the achievements they have achieved in performing their duties and become their competitors. At this time, if there is an agreement on the ownership of the achievements, it will be more convenient for enterprises to protect their rights.

2. Confidentiality agreement.

Enterprise management, can be based in the fierce competition in the market, there is always something unique, but unique if the competitors learn, the competitive advantage will be greatly discounted or no longer exist. Most of the time it's a trade secret. Confidentiality agreement is to regulate employees to keep business secrets. For example, a cookie manufacturer has good taste, both domestic and foreign sales, and many channels, both online and offline. What are the trade secrets of such an enterprise? Let's look at the production process, the enterprise will buy a lot of raw materials, involving supplier list and price information is the commercial secret, food enterprise products taste good, so the formula and technology of the biscuit production should be unlike most similar enterprises, formula and process is the commercial secret, the enterprise product sales, all channels of information, contact person's contact information and supply price, season different shipments per month, online sales, marketing strategy, pricing strategy, channel management, these are commercial secrets of the enterprises.

Above is the traditional enterprise, Internet enterprises involved in the trade secrets are not easy to detect. Such as a network game company, game program is divided into client and server side, the client object program, though users can get, but its source code is the commercial secret, the server application is not known to the user, regardless of the source program and object program is protected by copyright, but unknown program source code and server-side target is protected by the commercial secret. For online game company, and the procedure is also important to users of the game data, including the registration information and game role information, equipment, data, etc., these data because of the lack of originality is not protected by copyright, but the business secret protection, if the enterprise and employees signed a confidentiality agreement, the employee leaked the information will face a serious legal consequences, on the other hand, the enterprise is difficult to pursue.

Nondisclosure agreements are also useful for regulating relationships between startups and their partners, preventing competitors from stealing trade secrets in the name of collaboration. For start-ups, their accumulated data and business models are easy to be imitated without non-disclosure agreements, which may lead to the destruction of the enterprise market if they are imitated by large companies. If a confidentiality agreement is signed before cooperation with other companies, it can deter the partner from abusing the trade secrets obtained in cooperation to a certain extent.

3. Non-competition agreement.

In 2008, the labor contract law for the first time stipulated the non-competition restriction system at the legal level, that is, the enterprise has the right to ask the resigned employees not to engage in the work related to the enterprise's competition for a certain period of time under the premise of paying non-competition restriction compensation. In practice, many people think that this is a system that prevents the superior from protecting the inferior, because if the enterprise must hire an important talent, in order to avoid the restriction of competition, it is allowed to work from home or rent an office alone, so that it is difficult for the original employer to obtain evidence. However, such concerns do not fully consider the state of enterprise management, at least for large companies, especially listed companies, the non-competition agreement is still very binding.

The compliance requirements of listed companies are very high, and the management system is generally strict. Just think, if a listed company hires an employee who is under the obligation of non-competition, the enterprise may fall into unfair competition or intellectual property infringement lawsuit, which will cause more damage to the company's reputation than the benefits obtained by employing the employee. At the same time, if another office is rented to avoid obtaining evidence, it will cause great trouble to the management of the company, which will have a great impact on the original management system of the company. Therefore, for large companies, the costs and risks of hiring employees with non-competition obligation will far outweigh the benefits that the employees may bring. The problems that big companies face are the same ones that small companies face, and while the costs and risks are smaller, they are real. Therefore, a non-compete agreement between a company and its employees is useful, because the cost of breach of this agreement is not low.

3. What measures do start-ups take to avoid common intellectual property risks?

Startups are generally inexperienced, and there are ways to avoid risk.

1. Infringement risk of implementable retrieval

Founders generally more understanding of their products, if you think your product may have the risk of infringement of intellectual property can be sexually retrieval can be: the product launched in parts of product: practical on patent retrieval, retrieval scope including the main technology in the industry and competitors application technology, at least of their products is infringing intellectual property rights and other rights of others; Trademark search, to see whether the infringement of the brand of others; Copyright also want to see their own products are not infringing others content. At this point, the product should be evaluated to at least give the company's management a sense of how risky the intellectual property is.

2. Legalization of enterprise daily office software

The current operating system software, office software, design software is a lot of paid software, enterprises should use their own software legalization, do not have to pay, but a lot of software can use free software instead of paid software. In addition, it is necessary to manage the software installed on the company's internal computers and restrict employees from installing unauthorized software. Many fee-paying software companies are members of the business software alliance. They have been monitoring and safeguarding rights of various enterprises. If enterprises cannot manage their employees' computers well, they may become the object of their rights protection.

3. Review the publicity content

Picture rights protection is another major disaster area for intellectual property rights protection. Many enterprises' official weibo posts have the infringement problem of unauthorized use of others' copyright works, and the compensation is often thousands of yuan per picture after rights protection. In the Internet era, the forms of corporate advertising are diversified and the content is very flexible. However, if we do not pay attention to the copyright of the promotional pictures, the enterprise may face sky-high claims from the picture dealers.