Egg Media Industries is a high-tech multimedia company based in Sydney. In the early days its founders, Matt and Meg, didn’t give IP much thought.
THE CHALLENGE: THE COMPANY NAME
As the business grew they saw potential IP problems staring at them: ‘We are Egg Media Industries but there is also an Egg Design and Egg Media Productions. We discovered this when we went looking for the URL for our website’.
Now they are looking at expanding in the US – something they would never have considered when setting up the business. This raises more potential issues:
‘US actress Jodie Foster has a company called Egg’, Meg says. ‘We never thought our business name would be in competition with someone like Jodie, but the more we do more global work, who knows what will happen?’
THE LESSON: DO YOUR IP HOMEWORK
Now that their eyes are open, Meg and Matt are going to address issues they should have looked at from the start:
‘We’re lifting our IP game. We now realise that having a registered trade mark is vital, as our internet presence is strong. We also make sure our production work is protected by copyright so any reproduction of it brings a benefit back to us’.