Register a Trademark

Worried that someone might be able to wrest your intellectual property away from you? Here’s how you protect your IP.   FOR MOST businesses, ownership of the rights to a brand name, slogans, designs, content, inventions and code bases are of utmost importance for the success and value of the business. These rights are collectively known as intellectual property rights. Getting a business’ intellectual property protection wrong can be a very expensive mistake, in both the long and short run, and, whilst getting it right is not too difficult, it requires awareness of the best avenues available to protect one’s rights. Intellectual property protection quite often requires a combination of carefully constructed agreements being put in place with both internal employees and external parties to protect and enforce such rights, in conjunction with the registration of rights where possible. HOW TO AVOID THE FIVE COMMON IP MISTAKES Below are some of the common mistakes made...

A trademark is simply a sign that serves to distinguish your business’ goods or services from those of other business’ goods or services, and prevents others from using names, words, slogans, logo’s etc which are the same as, or confusingly similar to, yours. By taking a trademark registration service , you obtain the exclusive rights to use your name, slogan or logo in your industry.

If you have no idea whether your trademark may be available for registration, why not try out Legal Legend’s free basic trademark search to give you some idea of whether it may be available.

WHILE THERE ARE a number of important aspects to any customer agreement, at its core, the agreement seeks to do two ‘simple in theory’ things: regulate the extent of the liability of the company. To get customers to pay. Legal Legend’s Automated Employment Agreement Builder is a first of its kind in South Africa. The precise formats of the agreements regulating these things are varied, and all seek to achieve the same result, but, depending on the type of business, may do so through a terms of service on a website, a service level agreement or any other formal written agreement. There are several standard provisions (look to the Electronic Communications Act of 2005 for guidance) that ought to be included in any customer agreement, but, specific advice should be sought in relation to the commercial impact of legislation such as the Consumer Protection Act, the National Credit Act and the Protection of Personal Information Act (covered, to some degree, here). Speci...