Intellectual Property Legal Concerns

If you have a company that involves any type of intangible intellectual property then anytime you hire employees, or contract with independent contractors, or even have an unpaid internship program it is important to cover your bases in regards to intellectual property.

We use a basic contract that was provided by our attorney that outlines that anything an employee or contractor produces belongs to the company.

Some questions to think about though:

• If an employee is working on a project at the office, but then goes home and makes a breakthrough that can be patented, who owns the patent?
• If you hire a freelance graphic designer to create a custom mascot for your company who owns the copyright to that design?
• If your friend's nephew coins the tag line that you are going to use can you trade mark it?
• If an employee, after hours, using his own computer and tools makes an invention does the company have any rights to that?  What if it was directly related to what you were doing in the lab?  What if the employee used a laptop owned by the company?

The bottom line is no matter what your policy is, you don't want to have surprises.  So everything should be written out and clear to both the employer and the employee and/or contractor.