This is unfortunate, and leads to corporate legal departments and outside counsel being viewed by management as generating cost, not value. To maximize return from its investment, a company should take a prospective and strategic, rather than reactionary and myopic, view of intellectual property. Similarly, the company should anticipate, and develop strategies for, potential intellectual property disputes. That may entail periodic searches of federal patent and copyright records, seeking licenses from third parties, and designing around patents held by litigious competitors. For strategic planning to occur, either company management must understand intellectual property or counsel with broad intellectual property experience must learn the direction and goals of the company.
Patent law protects inventions that are novel, useful, and unobvious.
A patent grants its owner the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the claimed invention. Patents are time consuming and expensive to obtain, leading many companies to seek patent protection only for critically important innovations. Copyright law protects writings and other forms of expression from unauthorized duplication, modification, and distribution. Copyright protects only the way an idea is expressed, not the idea itself. Substantial copyright protection arises automatically when a work is created, but to obtain maximum protection the owner should place a copyright notice on the work and register it with the U.S. Copyright Office.