About Intellectual Property
Protecting your IP
Impacts of Publication on Intellectual Property
If you want to retain your IP rights, it is important that your intellectual property (IP) is not disclosed prior to it being adequately protected. Obviously, unless your IP is adequately protected, once you publish it, there is nothing to stop someone else from using your idea. This does not mean that protecting your IP will stop you from ever publishing. For example, if you want to patent your idea then you must not publish until you have protected your IP with a patent application. However, part of the patenting process is to publish your patent specification and once this is done, you are free to publish your IP and still have the comfort of it being protected by a patent. This means that even though you publish your idea, noone else can legally use it without your approval.
It is important to understand that patenting means that you will have to delay but not prevent publication. Patenting allows protection of ideas for commercial reasons (i.e. giving you a monopoly right to use the idea) while also allowing you to publish.
Patents are only granted on ideas that are not publicly known. So if you want to patent an idea you cannot publicly disclose the idea until you have patent protection. A public disclosure can include a journal paper, poster presentation or oral presentation at a conference, or even disclosure to a single individual.
Sometimes, your IP may not have commercial value but will have more value to you in terms of reputational benefits through increasing your publication list. In such cases, you will be afforded copyright protection on your publication. However, you should consider before preparing a publication or public disclosure, whether or not your idea would have commercial potential and speak to the Manager of Innovation and Commercialisation (MIC) for your Faculty for advice before disclosing.