Ownership is one of the most critical issues when it comes to intellectual property - particularly in situations where you've hired someone else to help develop intellectual property for you, or where you've paid someone to purchase their existing intellectual property. Even if you have no desire to formally protect your patents, trademarks, copyrights and/or trade secrets, you still need to ensure that you actually own those intellectual property assets - and such ownership status should be memorialized in an appropriate written agreement (typically what is referred to as an "assignment" agreement).

Without such a written agreement in place, you could potentially run into issues down the road that might prevent you from monetizing your intellectual property, or allow the original creators to monetize the intellectual property as well (even where those creators were technically your employees or independent contractors at the time). Additionally, if your company is seeking investors or buyers, any such potential investors or buyers will expect your company to have full and unencumbered ownership and control over the intellectual property required to conduct business. In fact, potential investors/buyers will likely perform significant "due diligence" into your company's IP ownership prior to any deal being finalized. If a potential investor/buyer discovers that your company does not own the IP that it should, that could delay any potential deal, significantly decrease the perceived value of your company, or even kill the deal completely.

These scenarios might seem counterintuitive, given that you are paying these creators to develop the intellectual property for you - but different courts have ruled both ways in cases where there is no written agreement in place. So to avoid any uncertainties, again, it is critical that you memorialize your ownership of any intellectual property in an appropriate written agreement - and preferably before the underlying intellectual property has even been developed.

Depending on the situation, these types of ownership terms can be worked into employment agreements or independent contractor agreements, or they could be prepared as standalone assignment agreements.

If you are in need of an enforceable ownership agreement to better ensure that you actually own your valuable intellectual property, or simply would like more information, we invite you to call 888-789-5789 or email us to schedule your FREE initial consultation, during which we can explain the importance of these ownership issues to you in more detail, draft an intellectual property ownership agreement (or ownership terms to be inserted into a larger agreement) that is tailored to accommodate your particular needs, and answer any follow-up questions that you may have.