How to protect my software?
I am looking forward to register business in UK (England), currently we are still in development of software but, next year we should be launching it live for the people. This is going to be a commercial product and will be available world wide.
My question is: how do I protect my software, do I need to register software name including the way our software works and how it is different among the other softwares in the same market? How this should be done world wide?
Also, I am not a programmer, should I provide some agreement like non-disclosure for my programmers even though I don't have company yet? Or this can be done only once the company is setup?
My goal is to protect my software from copying new ideas from our software, also the name of software.
1 Answer
Protecting the name of the software should be a simple step. You just need to file for a trademark in every country where you want to protect your brand.
You should also think of buying all the domain names that have an identical or similar name to your brand, so that no other company will be able to "ride" on your success.
In order to make sure that the intellectual property of your software stays in the company you should have a part in the contract the states clearly that the intellectual property of their work for you belongs to your company. You should also have something that prevents your employees to work for a competitor for a certain period after they leave your company.
Regarding protecting the software itself, the best protection would be to have a software solution which is hard to copy. If you really have something so complex that is hard to replicate and you can keep your "secret sauce" secret you will be protected even without a patent (think of Coca-Cola for instance, that doesn't have a patent, but no other company was able to replicate their taste). Nevertheless, if you have something that can be easily replicated, but it is still innovative and was not publicly published before by anyone you might want to try and file a patent.
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About the domain names, I don't think it is worth buying all countries domain names... May be it is worth just buying for europe, like eu domain name, some asia domain name, us, uk may be.. something like that rather than buying everything.. ? Anyway, I think I am going to buy only couple of domain names, but really going to use just one. Because I am not going to market in different languages our software, the main language is - english. An extension *.com would be good for this to go global I think. – John 13 years ago
