Enterprise
The Idea Protection Business by Dawn Gresko
While modern society has laws and rules in place to protect our physical property—from damage and theft to our homes and the items found within, you might ask: What kind of protections do we have available for our intellectual property? What’s to stop the theft of our inventions, which are oftentimes intangible ideas? Here enters intellectual property law, or IP law, which covers four main areas: patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets. So, just how do we define intellectual property? In short, intellectual property can be summed up as a creation of the mind—an idea, a piece of work, or an invention created uniquely by you. However, to better understand the inner workings of intellectual property law, Business Climate spoke with expert J. Nevin Shaffer, Jr.—a Florida Board Certified Intellectual Property Law Specialist and Licensed Patent Attorney, who is registered in three states (Florida, Alabama and Texas), as well as adjunct professor of the new intellectual property law course at the University of West Florida’s Department of Accounting and Finance. “I love what I do, I always say it’s the idea protection business,” said Shaffer. “Most lawyers you hire when something bad happens. My job is to protect a new little idea and make sure it grows up.” 54 | Business Climate | nwflbusinessclimate.com
As professor of the intellectual property law course at the UWF, which held its inaugural session this fall, Shaffer teaches a proper understanding of how to protect a business from competitors by developing IP protection plans for businesses in this introductory course. And, if you were thinking the class is strictly for pre-law students, think again. In fact, it might help to know there are no pre-requisites required. “My objective is to have intellectual property as a required course at UWF,” said Shaffer. “Why? It’s not just valuable to pre-law students but to those in various fields—folks who are business majors or want to become accountants.” For a real-world perspective, Shaffer has invited several local business people including leaders Julie Sheppard of IMHC, Kelly Massey and Glenn McDuffy of SBDC, John and Marsha Martelli of Martelli Enterprises, litigation
attorneys J.D. Smith and Brian Hancock, as well as Joel Smith of AppRiver and Mike Droogsma of Broussard’s Bayou Grill & Cajun Market. These special guest speakers talk to students about how intellectual property plays a role in how they run their respective businesses. As Shaffer puts it, if you’re an accountant with zero knowledge of intellectual property, then you won’t know what to value and account for in order to provide max protection for it under the law. For this reason, Shaffer’s aim with his course is to not only explain how intellectual property adds value to a business, but to explain and help you identify how any company has intellectual property, discuss strategies a business can employ to start protecting IP at basic levels and how to maximize protection in each form when deemed beneficial to a company, as well as explain the