Virtually in every business intellectual property- be it patents, trademarks, software, copyrights, agreements, or trade secrets- is becoming more and more important asset. There are several reasons why an organization may need an IP audit: an IP audit can help the organization to manage its IP, to valuate the IP, to identify opportunities to further exploit the IP, to identify misuses of the IP, to identify if you would need a license.
Let Dodds & Associates provide you an IP audit. We help you to identify all the IP your organization has, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, agreements, and contracts. We evaluate the measures you have to protect the existing IP. As a part of IP audit or as a separate study we can provide you a freedom to operate analysis to define that your business is not using someone else’s protected technology. We provide you a comprehensive, written analysis and help you creating and implementing a plan to manage your IP.
Freedom to Operate Analysis
Freedom to operate means ability to experiment and commercialize a product or service without illegally using someone else’s protected technology.
Technology can be protected by patents, contracts, trade secrets, copyrights and trademarks. The most important and prominent form of protection is patent. Infringement of a patent may become extremely expensive and therefore freedom-to-operate analysis most often concentrates in patents.
In order to make a freedom to operate analysis the organization needs to define all the intellectual property protecting the product or service in question. Second step is to make in detail search of patents and published patent applications on the same field of technology as your product or service. Analyzing the claims in the patent will help choosing those patents that are really relevant to your business. Thereafter the relevant patents and patent applications have to be broken down according to expiration dates, priority dates and geographical area they are covering. Comparing the coverage of the relevant patents then will give an idea whether you would need a license to build and develop your business.
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