Licensing Intellectual Property

Inventions, artwork and trademark are all protected by the law. However: Inventors can license their inventions. Artists can license their artwork, including their photographs, paintings, songs and books. Businesses can license their trademarks to other businesses or obtain a license from another businesses. Licensing Intellectual Property can be good for business. For example, an author may want to collect royalties on the sale of their music. A business may want to license their product for sale by another company, but may want to maintain control over the manufacture of the product to make sure it meets their quality control. Another way is to address privacy issues or trade secrets with non-compete/non-disclosure agreements. Licensing is an agreement between the intellectual property rights owner and some other part that is authorized to use the rights in exchange of an agreed payment. It grants the permission to do something that would be an infringement of the rights without the license. Some of the possible licensing: a) Trademark Licensing b) Franchising Agreement c) Copyright License Agreement d) Technology License Agreement If you wish to make your Intellectual Property available for others to use, you might need to create a contract, and guarantee your rights are being preserved. The benefits of licensing are: You can share costs and risks between multiple businesses: if one business is willing to invest in manufacturing, you might agree to share a portion of your intellectual property (copyright, trademark or patent) in exchange for payment of a fee . This fee might be a royalty on each song or book sold. In this way, one party is absorbing the overhead costs like manufacturing, while the second party shares their innovation, their artwork, their invention or their brand name. Through a license agreement, an artist or business can receive a royalty simply for sharing music, an invention or a brand name. Visit one of our experienced contract attorneys to discuss the negotiation and drafting of an appropriate contract or licensing agreement to help promote your intellectual property.