Featuring Susan Wilson, Director of the Office of Intellectual Property Rights – U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration.
This podcast is part two of a two-part series. In this segment Susan shares the numerous tools and resources offered by the Department of Commerce to assist small- and medium-size businesses in protecting and enforcing their intellectual property rights in the U.S. and abroad. Key among the tools offered is legal advice on how to protect your IPR in a particular country.
Transcript:
Ron Johnson: You’ve worked hard to develop your products and services and to grow your small business. The time might be right to enter into the international marketplace. But now you realize there is another step before you jump into exporting. How will you protect your intellectual property rights in these foreign markets, and who can help you?
Hello, I’m Ron Johnson with the U.S. Small Business Administration, Your Small Business Resource. In our studio today is Susan Wilson, Director of the Office of Intellectual Property Rights at the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. Welcome, Susan, glad you could make it back for our second discussion on how to protect and enforce intellectual property rights.
Susan Wilson: Terrific. Thank you, Ron. I’m happy to be back.
Ron Johnson: Now, Susan, small businesses are particularly vulnerable when it comes to piracy and counterfeiting. How does your office empower small business owners to secure and enforce their intellectual property rights?
Susan Wilson: We like to focus on a couple of stages. First, of course, you have to understand intellectual property rights are private rights. They are privately owned. And so, not only in the U.S. but also in foreign markets, the first step is really up to the right holder to make sure their rights are registered and that they are making smart business decisions, that they are picking smart distributors, trustworthy distributors, that they are picking trustworthy manufacturers, so there are a lot of things that fall to the company.
When you're a small company, you may not be aware of all of the pitfalls and dangers and considerations that should really be part of your business plan. So what we try to do is first educate businesses, business owners, on how to protect themselves, how to obtain rights and how to enforce those rights, with the idea that first, they are the first line of defense really. And then further along in the process, if they run into trouble, that’s when we step in and try to help. So our tools and resources fall into really several different categories. One is educating yourself about IP. Another is educating yourself about what to do once you have IP, if you run into trouble and you are trying to decide what market to export to and there is information about that. And then third, if you get into those markets and you find that you're having trouble, how we can actually help you.
So if it’s okay with you, Ron, I’d like to run through a brief description of some of these different products that are available, completely free of charge, at the website that I mentioned.
Okay, one, at the very beginning, you are trying to understand what IPR is and whether it’s important to your business. We developed, along with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which is actually another sub-agency of Commerce -- I’m in the International Trade Administration -- we worked with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and with the Small Business Administration to develop an online training program to help small businesses learn how to evaluate, protect, and enforce their IPR. This program is available, as I mentioned, at the website stopfakes.gov. It’s completely free of charge and it’s available in English, Spanish, and French.
Now, once you understand what IPR is, you have to kind of think about, okay, which markets do I want to go into and what challenges may I face in those markets? How do I secure my rights in those markets? We have developed, as a government, what we call Country Toolkits. So for more specific information on protecting IPR in a particular market, you can go to these toolkits from stopfakes.gov and there, they are hosted on embassy websites, so these are again U.S. government resources hosted on the embassy websites that explain to you what the process is for obtaining protection in that market. And right now, we have toolkits for a dozen countries: Brazil, Brunei, China, Croatia, Egypt, the EU, European Union, India, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and we're constantly working to add to that list. So I would say those first two things, understanding IPR and then looking to see what markets you are interested in exporting to and what the particularities are of those markets would be good places to start.
Ron Johnson: We’re reaching the end of the program. Susan, what does the Department of Commerce see for the future?
Susan Wilson: A variety of things. Ron, I’ve been doing this stuff for 20-some years. The landscape has definitely changed. It’s definitely much more challenging now than it was, I think, a few years ago, when most of the manufacturing happened in the U.S. But I see a bright future for U.S. companies, for U.S. exporters, for U.S. products.
We still make the best stuff in the world. Sometimes we make it here, sometimes we make it elsewhere, but people want our products, the products of our innovation. They want our music. They want our movies. They want what we produce. And so I think if we can get smart and we can at least start eliminating some of the... people like to say, “low-hanging fruit,” if we can at least wipe away some of the easy mistakes through educational programs like this one, get businesses to be a little bit smarter going in, we’ll have a better chance I think at the bigger level where I operate or my colleagues when we deal with foreign governments, we’ll have a better chance of getting them to change their systems in the long run if we're a little bit smarter when we jump off. So I see nothing but good things ahead, and I may just be an eternal optimist but we continue to make the stuff the world wants and we just need to be smarter about protecting ourselves. That’s all there is to it.
Ron Johnson: Our thanks to Susan Wilson, Director of the Office of Intellectual Property Rights at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. Be sure to check out Part 1 of this two-part series with Susan and learn more about how to secure and enforce your intellectual property rights.
To learn more about the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration and their role in intellectual property rights, go to www.stopfakes.gov. And for more information on SBA’s exporting programs and services, go to www.sba.gov. Until next time, this is Ron Johnson with the U.S. Small Business Administration, Your Small Business Resource.
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