Home topics small-business-resources legal Legal Managing Legal Protecting your intellectual property offshore Mark Lloyd November 2, 2009 Protecting your intellectual property offshore Intro: Smart companies fiercely protect their best ideas and inventions. But if you’re only doing that in Australia, you’re only doing half the job. Here’s how to protect yourself globally. STORY MARK LLOYD Australian companies and innovators have shown that they can be inventive as the best in the world. Among many other inventions, Australian companies have been responsible for the aircraft black box and the polymer banknote, and CSIRO has recently been confirmed as the part owner of the Wi-Fi wireless network systems. However, it’s a big bad world out there and new and valuable inventions will be quickly copied by your competitors. Smart companies will try to head this off by protecting their innovations with one or more forms of intellectual property (IP) protection. Regular readers will recognise that this can include patents to protect functional improvements, design registrations to protect the appearance of manufactured objects, trade marks to protect brands, copyright to protect software, creative works and certain compilations, and trade secrets to protect secret information. A big issue for Australia companies wishing to export goods or services offshore is that, in general, many of these IP rights apply only to the country in which they are registered. As one example, an Australian patent has no legal power in China or the US (and vice-versa). Filing patents, trade marks or registered designs in multiple countries