Chapter 5 Summary: Intellectual Property

Download the Employment Law Legal Checklist and identify action items for your organization.

Legal Checklist: Intellectual Property

Summary.

1. Intellectual property are assets of an individual or enterprise that are intangible. There are four kinds of intellectual property protections: trademarks, copyright, patents, and trade secrets.
2. In the process of protecting your nonprofit’s intellectual property rights, a good place to start is knowing who owns the intellectual property of your organization’s key elements.
3. Nonprofits need to respect the intellectual property rights of others, just as you want others to honor the intellectual property rights of your organization. Intellectual property litigation is expensive. Adopt a policy that respects the intellectual property rights of others, which includes searching to see if others have adopted intellectual property similar to your organization’s prior to your adoption.
4. The general public wants to know how you are going to use the information given to your organization, particularly if gathered through a website. A privacy policy keeps web communication honest by telling visitors about the collection, storage, and use of their information.
5. Your nonprofit’s online presence opens the door for intellectual property challenges, both in how you use the information from others and how others make use of your information.

Here are some questions to think about.

• How are you protecting your nonprofit’s ideas and products, which may include websites, print materials, or unique research on the issues your organization addresses?
• How is your nonprofit respecting the intellectual property rights of others? What specific actions do board members, volunteers, and/or staff take?

Next steps.

• Determine what assets your organization owns by completing the Asset Audit Activity.
• Review Public Counsel Law Center’s Intellectual Property Licensing Basics for Nonprofits resource to gain a deeper understanding on the topic.

Chapter Materials

Let’s Go Legal Guide

Start by downloading the Let's Go Legal guide that includes checklists, activities, and reflection questions. As .

Chapter: Intellectual Property – Guide

Chapter: Intellectual Property – Video Transcript

Legal Checklist: Intellectual Property

Nonprofit Association of Washington

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The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.

The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.

The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.

The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.