You’ve spent hours choosing a witty, innovative name for your new business, your first product is ready for production and you can already visualise the marketing campaign. But how can you stop others helping themselves to the fruits of your labours? The law can help you protect your ideas and brands in a number of different ways.

Registering your brand name as a trade mark can help distinguish you from your competitors. Provided your name isn’t already in use or descriptive, you may be able to acquire an effective monopoly on use of that name and prevent others using it on similar goods.

Copyright can automatically arise in the physical way you express your ideas. Your photographs, your corporate logo, the layout of your website and even the source code in your software are all examples of creative, original works which cannot be copied by others without permission from the copyright owner.

If you have invented something genuinely new and groundbreaking you may be able to register a patent in respect of it. The hurdles to registration are higher than for many other rights, but once you manage it you acquire an exclusive right to use that technology.

These are the big hitters, but there are other rights which protect your business such as design rights, confidentiality, database rights and the law of passing off.

Rights such as these can be used not only to protect what you are doing but can be exploited to provide a valuable income stream in their own right.

You may have gone to a lot of time and trouble to ensure that you have all the rights in your brand, image or work, but what’s the next step to unlocking the value in these assets? Intellectual property bears something of a resemblance to its bricks-and-mortar cousin – you can use it yourself, lease it and even sell it, but there are a few points to bear in mind.

Registered trademarks must be used to retain their protected status. Third parties can challenge the validity of the registration if the trade mark has not been used, so make sure that you plaster it all over your products or at least that you can show a genuine intention to use it in the future. You can always license someone else to use it without losing your ownership, which can give you an additional income stream as well. Similarly copyright, design rights, trade secrets and know-how can all be licensed for others to use

Patents are treated differently – there is no requirement of use, so provided that you pay the renewal fees you can sit on them for years without having to do anything with them. But do you really want to deprive the world of your masterful invention? Again, you can licence a third party to use it in return for a royalty. Or you can set up a joint venture arrangement with a manufacturer where you provide the designs and technical know how and they put the invention into production.