Invention disclosure and property rights

According to §§ 5, 40 ArbNErfG, civil servants and employees in the public sector are obliged to report service inventions (§ 4 ArbNErfG) in writing to their employer or employer's employer." Forms for reporting inventions are available from us on request.

Your business idea may get by without a software development, but certainly not without texts and images. These are the most common cases of copyright protection. The protection arises automatically at the creation of your work. This is how you become the author and stay that way, because copyrights cannot be sold or bought. You can only grant yourself a right of use or - if you are the author - grant it to others. The use can be limited in time, space or also to certain media. The price of the right of use also depends on the scope.

As a trademark (word mark) you can protect e.g. your company name or product name. This is important for your domain name. If you use a logo or an icon for an APP, you can protect these representations as a figurative mark - or in combination with text - as a word mark. With search, the application at the German Patent and Trademark Office you should ideally plan a lead time of 4-5 months.

As a design, one can protect new two- or three-dimensional products. For example, you can protect clothing, furniture or car rims. Material, function and size do not matter. You can quickly get into trouble if, for example, you copy design-protected products with a 3-D printer and sell them commercially.

If you have developed new devices or manufacturing processes, these inventions can be protected by technical property rights. Protection is possible as a patent or as a utility model. In order for inventions to be registered for a patent, they must be new worldwide, be commercially applicable and represent a non-obvious solution to a problem. But even if you have not made your own invention, technical protection rights can affect you. For example, if you import devices (e.g. coffee machines) for sale, patented components may well be present in the device.

The law protects consumers and competitors. Among other things, it deals with prohibited spam advertising by fax or e-mail, imitation or obstruction of competitors, betrayal of company and trade secrets, untrue statements, and much more. It is one of the basic laws for founders to be aware of

If founding ideas are based on software, the question of the possibility of protection also arises here. Like a text, software is only subject to copyright. Exceptions are so-called computer-implemented inventions, which can be registered as a patent. There must be a technicality (technical character).  This can be e.g. the application of the software in connection with a sensor.

Property rights also arise in the pre-founding phase. A founder has a good idea for a company name, a co-founder has written texts for the homepage and another co-founder has taken the product photos for the flyer. But what happens when the team splits up? Who has which right? Such questions need to be clarified and, ideally, agreements need to be recorded in writing so that there are no unpleasant surprises in the case of a dispute.