Intellectual Property
Top tips
Before we get into the fine detail, here are a few bullet points around the things you need to be most careful of.
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Be careful about telling people about your idea in any detail, as this might affect your ability to patent the idea later. Don't disclose your idea to a public group (at least in any detail). If you tell anyone in detail about how your idea might work, then you won't be able to protect it, and claim that the idea is yours.
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Don't copy anyone else's idea. Firstly it's not nice, and secondly – they have already let it loose in the public domain, so you'll be paying lots of money to the government for a protection they can't grant.
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If you want to talk to someone confidentially about your idea, then use a Non-Disclosure Agreement. Handily, the good guys at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) have designed a guide to these: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/patent/p-applying/p-should/p-should-otherprotect/p-should-otherprotect-cda.htm
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We promise that we won't pinch your idea either! Please download the non-disclosure agreement that we will have with you here
Our promise to you
We will not exploit or reproduce your idea without your explicit agreement. If you would like us to sign a non-disclosure agreement for your idea, please download our form here, and send it to
The MAD Ideas Competition Administrator, National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship,
3, Priestley Wharf, Holt Street, Birmingham, B7 4BN.
How do I own my idea?
Just like you may own your laptop or your car, you can own intellectual property or IP. The main problem is, unlike a car or a laptop which are physical objects, it's difficult to tell what IP is, and where your IP starts and stops. So the government has put in place some definitions to help us.
First is a Patent. To get a Patent, you have to register your idea with the Intellectual Property Office as a “Patent Pending”. There are rules about what can be patented, but generally they can be summed up as follows:
Your invention must be
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Novel (i.e. No one else must have made something in quite the same way)
Take an inventive step (i.e. If your idea is based on a previous idea or someone else's invention, then you must substantially change the function or the method of function of that idea)
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You must be able to “reduce it to practice” - it must be able to be made. This is why the Intellectual Property Office will not receive patent applications on perpetual motion machines, as the physicists tell us that they are impossible. Although there is a British Rail patent for a flying saucer that's been registered – It's thought possible to make - it's just not possible to make it yet.
You must have “priority”. I.e. You must have invented it first and be able to prove it. In the UK this means that the date on you patent application must be earlier than anyone else's (though in the US, you get 6 months to file if you've got proof of an earlier invention date).
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The idea must not be in the “public” domain”. i.e., you should not tell other people about your idea in any detail (investors, purchasers, friends)
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For more information about Patents, look at the Intellectual Property Office website http://www.ipo.gov.uk/whatis/whatis-patent.htm
Copyright © is more straightforward. This is a right to protect you from anyone directly copying your work. This might seem important if you've written a novel or a poem (think about submitting the whole text of “Atonement” to a publisher with your name instead of Ian McEwan's) but equally it applies to copying tracts off the internet or out of books and representing them as your own. This isn't only plagiarism – it's theft as well. Copyright only applies to specific types of work (including software programmes!). For more info, see www.ipo.gov.uk/whatis/whatis-copyright.htm
Two other types of IP are Design Rights and Trade Marks. Everyone knows what a trade mark is (think of Coca Cola, and the Virgin logo) but it can also be a phrase or tag-line that a company thinks is important. Like Design Rights, it can be registered or unregistered (the difference between ® and TM).
Design Rights are more complicated, as the registered version applies to different types of designs to the unregistered version. Effectively, the unregistered design right, like copyright, protects the look of a design – the “internal or external shape or configuration of an original design” It doesn't protect you from theft of the two dimensional aspects (like patterns). These need to be protected by Registered Design Rights, which have some similarities to Patents.
For more information about all of these, please see the IPO website www.ipo.gov.uk