IP Valuation FAQ
Any and all types of business corporations are relevant.
IP valuation can assist your business in many ways, ultimately enabling you to
make more strategic business decisions. IP valuation can assist you in
financial reports, clarify asset worth, justify project value and can even help
you raise funds to enter potential joint ventures.
There are 3 main methods for calculation: Income method (the preferred method), Cost method, and Market method. All of which are domestically and internationally standard-compliant methods. These valuations will be conducted by IP valuers that have been certified by the Malaysian government.
- Terence Lim – A chartered accountant in Malaysia and a certified IP valuer with MyIPO. He was certificated by the World Trade Institute in Switzerland.
- Kuok Pui Leng – A business analyst who has worked in Accenture.
- Tee Lin Yik – The CEO and founder of Tee IP, an IP specialist firm based in Malaysia and Singapore. He is a certified IP professional by MyIPO with more than 17 years of experience in IP management.
- Lim Hui Lee – The Head of the Patent Department in Tee IP. She is a certified IP professional and has more than 15 years of experience in IP-related matters.
- Derrick Hum – The Director of Alternative Sales Channels at Tee IP. He has more than a decade’s worth of experience in business development and marketing.
- Dato’ Mohd Roslan – The Advisor of Valuing IP. He was the former Director General of MyIPO and previously an Assistant Director of Enforcement at the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs. With 37 years of experience in the legal field and over 36 years in the government sector, Dato’ Roslan is highly proficient in law revision, drafting and prosecution, he also holds international government relations with top IP leaders in the ASEAN region.
The methods used by Valuing IP to generate reports are all standard compliant domestically and internationally. Our team is also highly certified and comprises of experienced IP professionals and veterans in the industry.
The approximate fee of IP valuation is in the range of RM25,000 – RM30,000. The benefit of IP valuation is certain as it accurately measures the worth of your intangible assets and provides a clearer, more solid view of your company’s overall value to both you and potential shareholders.
ip Registration FAQ
A Trademark normally refers to a company name, individual name, signature, label, sound, smell, colour, logo, slogan or shape of product of a business.
A Trademark is your business/corporate identity that will help you distinguish yourself from your competitors.
- Wording mark (broadest protection for wording)
- Device mark (logo/picture)
- Composite mark (combination of wording & device)
- Trademark is territorial (country-by-country basis)
- Trademark registration is based on per mark per class
- Trademark registration is based on first to file rule (first-come-first-served basis)
- Trademark registration is based on 45 international classes
- Need to conduct search to check if anyone else has registered for the same trademark
- 5 main requirements of REGISTRABLE Trademark:
ii. Signature (but must be legible or readable by public)
iii. Invented word/words (not found in dictionary)
iv. Wording having DIRECT reference to the:
• Quality
• Character
• Geographical name
• Surname is not registrable
• Use of the marks in business is not needed to satisfy all requirements,just satisfying one is sufficient for TM registration.
- Asset - can sell/rent
- Insurance - protection against any infringement
- Weapon - sue others for using the same brand
- Marketing - quality & prestige, eliminate competitors, competitions may need you to submit prove of TM registration. Online e-commerce also requires you to furnish your registration to prove you are the owner of the trademark
- Legal - lower risk of doing business
- Investors - increase investor confidence because business risk is lowered with proper management of intangible assets
- Government - grant/franchise/loan from Goverment may require you to prove you are the owner of the Trademark
The approximate fee of IP valuation is in the range of RM25,000 – RM30,000. The benefit of IP valuation is certain as it accurately measures the worth of your intangible assets and provides a clearer, more solid view of your company’s overall value to both you and potential shareholders.
Copyright (or author’s right) is a legal term used to describe the rights that creators have over their literary and artistic works. Works covered by copyright range from books, music, paintings, sculpture, and films, to computer programs, databases, advertisements, maps, and technical drawings.
- Exhaustive lists of works covered by copyright are usually not to be found in legislation. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, works commonly protected by copyright throughout the world include:
− literary works such as novels, poems, plays, reference works, newspaper articles;
− computer programs, databases;
− films, musical compositions, and choreography;
− artistic works such as paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculptures;
− architecture; and
− advertisements, maps, and technical drawings.
- Copyright protection extends only to expressions, and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such. Copyright may or may not be available for a number of objects such as titles, slogans, or logos, depending on whether they contain sufficient authorship.
- There are two types of rights under copyright:
− economic rights, which allow the rights owner to derive financial reward from the use of his works by others; and
− moral rights, which protect the non-economic interests of the author.
- Most copyright laws state that the rights owner has the economic right to authorise or prevent certain uses in relation to a work or, in some cases, to receive remuneration for the use of his work (such as through collective management). The economic rights owner of a work can prohibit or authorise:
− its reproduction in various forms, such as printed publication or sound recording;
− its public performance, such as in a play or musical work;
− its recording, for example, in the form of compact discs or DVDs;
− its broadcasting, by radio, cable or satellite;
− its translation into other languages; and
− its adaptation, such as a novel into a film screenplay.
- Examples of widely recognised moral rights include the right to claim authorship of a work and the right to oppose changes to a work that could harm the creator's reputation.
In the past, some countries had legislation in place that required the copyright holder to comply with certain formalities in order to receive copyright protection. One of those formalities was to include an indication that copyright had been claimed, such as by using the symbol ©. Currently, very few countries still impose formalities on copyright, therefore the use of such symbols is no longer a legal requirement. Nonetheless, many right owners still include the symbol © as a highly visible way to emphasize that that work is protected by copyright and that all rights are reserved, as opposed to a less restrictive license.
Firstly, copyright protection is automatic in all states party to the Berne Convention. Whilst there may be nuances to the particular national laws applicable in these states, in general there is a high degree of harmony. When we consider states that are not party to the Berne Convention, you must remember that copyright laws are territorial. In other words, they apply within the country in which they were passed. As such, if you wish to protect your work internationally, you must research and make sure that you comply with the relevant legal requirements in the country(ies) in which you wish your work to be protected.
There is no searchable international registry of copyright-protected works. This is because, as a general rule, copyright protection is automatic and does not depend on registration. In some countries, however you may encounter a voluntary copyright registry/ depositary and registering your work can be a smart choice as it would considerably assist you in the case of a dispute, for example over the ownership of the work. Although it may not affect copyright protection, some countries do require a deposit of samples of printed materials published in that country.
A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention. In other words, a patent is an exclusive right to a product or a process that generally provides a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem. To get a patent, technical information about the invention must be disclosed to the public in a patent application.
The patent owner may give permission to, or license, to other parties to use the invention on mutually agreed terms. The owner may also sell the right to the invention to someone else, who will then become the new owner of the patent. Once a patent expires, the protection ends, and an invention enters the public domain; that is, anyone can commercially exploit the invention without infringing the patent.
A patent owner has the right to decide who may – or may not – use the patented invention for the period in which the invention is protected. In other words, patent protection means that the invention cannot be commercially made, used, distributed, imported, or sold by others without the patent owner's consent.
Patents may be granted for inventions in any field of technology, from an everyday kitchen utensil to a nanotechnology chip. An invention can be a product – such as a chemical compound, or a process, for example – or a process for producing a specific chemical compound. Many products in fact contain a number of inventions. For example, a laptop computer can involve hundreds of inventions, working together.
Patent protection is granted for a limited period, generally 20 years from the filing date of the application.
Patents are territorial rights. In general, the exclusive rights are only applicable in the country or region in which a patent has been filed and granted, in accordance with the law of that country or region.
Patent rights are usually enforced in a court on the initiative of the rights owner. In most systems, a court of law has the authority to stop patent infringement. However the main responsibility for monitoring, identifying, and taking action against infringers of a patent lies with the patent owner.
Patented inventions have, in fact, pervaded every aspect of human life, from electric lighting (patents held by Edison and Swan) and plastic (patents held by Baekeland), to ballpoint pens (patents held by Biro), and microprocessors (patents held by Intel, for example).
Patents provide incentives to and protection for individuals by offering them recognition for their creativity and the possibility of material reward for their inventions. At the same time, the obligatory publication of patents and patent applications facilitates the mutually-beneficial spread of new knowledge and accelerates innovation by, for example, avoiding the necessity to “re-invent the wheel”.
Once knowledge is publicly available, by its nature, it can be used simultaneously by an unlimited number of persons. While this is perfectly acceptable for public information, it causes a dilemma for the commercialisation of technical knowledge. In the absence of protection of such knowledge, “free-riders” could easily use technical knowledge embedded in inventions without any recognition of the creativity of the inventor or contribution to the investments made by the inventor. As a consequence, inventors would naturally be discouraged to bring new inventions to the market, and tend to keep their commercially valuable inventions secret. A patent system intends to correct such under-provision of innovative activities by providing innovators with limited exclusive rights, thereby giving the innovators the possibility to receive appropriate returns on their innovative activities.
In a wider sense, the public disclosure of the technical knowledge in the patent, and the exclusive right granted by the patent, provide incentives for competitors to search for alternative solutions and to “invent around” the first invention. These incentives and the dissemination of knowledge about new inventions encourage further innovation, which assures that the quality of human life and the well-being of society is continuously enhanced.
An application for the registration of an industrial design or for the grant of a patent for an industrial design can be filed with the intellectual property (IP) office of the country (or region) in which protection is sought. We recommend that you consult us at Valuing IP.
In a legal sense, an industrial design constitutes the ornamental or aesthetic aspect of an article.
An industrial design may consist of three-dimensional features, such as the shape of an article, or two-dimensional features, such as patterns, lines or colors.
In principle, the owner of a registered industrial design or of a design patent has the right to prevent third parties from making, selling or importing articles bearing or embodying a design which is a copy, or substantially a copy, of the protected design, when such acts are undertaken for commercial purposes.
Industrial designs are applied to a wide variety of products of industry and handicraft items: from packages and containers to furnishing and household goods, from lighting equipment to jewelry, and from electronic devices to textiles. Industrial designs may also be relevant to graphic symbols, graphical user interfaces (GUI), and logos.
In most countries, an industrial design needs to be registered in order to be protected under industrial design law as a “registered design”. In some countries, industrial designs are protected under patent law as “design patents”.
Industrial design laws in some countries grant – without registration – time- and scope-limited protection to so-called “unregistered industrial designs”.
Depending on the particular national law and the kind of design, industrial designs may also be protected as works of art under copyright law.
Industrial design rights are granted for a limited period. The duration of the protection of industrial designs varies from country to country, but it amounts at least to 10 years. In many countries, the total duration of protection is divided into successive renewable periods.
Industrial design rights are usually enforced in a court, generally on the initiative of the owner of the rights, as provided for by the applicable law. The remedies and penalties vary from country to country and could be civil (injunctions to desist from an infringement, payment of damages, etc.), criminal or administrative.
An application for the registration of an industrial design or for the grant of a patent for an industrial design can be filed with the intellectual property (IP) office of the country (or region) in which protection is sought. We recommend that you consult us at Valuing IP.
