Who owns your IP?

When a company's intellectual property is core to its business, investors and prospective acquirers want to know that the company owns all the rights to that intellectual property. In most cases, owning intellectual property is preferable to licensing it.

Throughout a company's life cycle, there are times when the company's ownership of intellectual property may not be a given (for an overview of intellectual property rights, please see our articles on copyrights, patents, trade secrets and trademarks). This article describes some of those situations and the steps a company can take to ensure that it secures ownership of its intellectual property.