Intellectual property protection is crucial in ensuring that businesses’ possessions will not be stolen or copied. Moreover, it also creatives incentives that benefit not only the company but also the employees.
If you have intellectual property, you must protect it. How do you do this? One effective way of doing so is by using web scraping. Learn more about how to incorporate this to protect your intellectual property better.
What is intellectual property?
Original ideas, discoveries, innovations, work, and designs are included in intellectual property. Before, intellectual property protection was not a big deal. Nevertheless, because technology made it possible for the information to be more easily disseminated and accessed, it has been for any business to safeguard the work and creations from thieves, infringers, and copycats online.
How businesses can protect their intellectual property
Determine the Intellectual Property Owned
A better understanding of intellectual property protection can help employees understand what they need to protect. Corporate security should communicate with the executives who handle the capital to do that. Therefore, meeting with the CEO, COO, HR representatives, sales, production, research, and legal services team at least once every quarter is needed. Corporate leadership should have a harmonious relationship with these departments to protect intellectual property.
Knowing where intellectual property is needed
If a company solely concentrates on its IT systems, there is a high chance that it can miss other areas where intellectual property is kept. Printers, fax machines, copiers, and scanners can have the processed documents. These are usually in a network and connected to a remote management system. Therefore, it is important to know how to clean out these documents and prevent unauthorized access.
Cloud applications and other file-sharing programs must be closely managed by the company or the company’s IT. They need to identify what programs employees are using so that unauthorized access to these programs can be prevented. This also ensures that company-authorized utilities are secured and configured properly.
Employees must also know how to practice intellectual property protection. If they need to send an email at home or do any work-related task, they must be educated on how to properly handle intellectual property. Monitoring systems need to be placed so that the property where it is sent can be tracked. For third-party systems, companies often share their intellectual property with their suppliers, partners, customers. Therefore, contracts and controls need to be in place so that the intellectual property is secured and the terms in the contract are followed.
Prioritize intellectual property protection
Corporate security experts who have had much experience in intellectual property protection suggest doing a cost-benefit and risk analysis. This means making a map of the assets of the company figure out what information would do a lot of damage to the business if lost. Then, the next step is to decide which of the assets is at the most risk of being taken away. Doing these can help identify where to put more effort and money on.
Label important intellectual properties
If there is confidential information in the company, it is highly recommended to place a label or banner that says it is confidential. A note can be placed on each log-in screen if the information is proprietary. It may seem not much, but it could help when showing proof in court that someone illegally accessed information they should not see. If this evidence is not present, it will be hard to support the argument that it has been made clear that it is secured information.
Know what tools to utilize to protect your intellectual property
There are a lot of software programs available to track documents and other intellectual properties. Intellectual property protection is now one of the main components of many security programs. These programs do not only try to find sensitive files but also monitor how they are used and who uses them.
Web scraping is also one of the most effective ways to detect threats online. Because of the sophistication of automated traffic and bots, this is one of the smart approaches to determine and control the recent threats.
This method is used by people and companies who want to utilize a large amount of public web information to come up with better decisions. By doing web scraping, businesses can learn about the visitors to their websites and their behaviors. Anomalous behavior can be determined which is not fit for the company’s profile. Then, these suspicious visitors are categorized.
Conclusion
Finally, intellectual property protection is a vital asset to any business. It can help the business stand out from the competitors. Moreover, intellectual property is a source of revenue. That is why the innovations must be properly compensated.
Having a good business means giving importance to intellectual property protection so that the creations will not be copied, distributed, or sold without permission.
