USPTO Launches IP Awareness Tool

The USPTO and NIST have launched a new IP Awareness Assessment Tool aimed at helping small businesses, entrepreneurs and independent inventors improve their knowledge of all forms of intellectual property.

Awareness of IP rights among entrepreneurs and inventors is low in many countries. In 2009 the Canadian Intellectual Property Office conducted a survey of small and medium-sized businesses and found that 62% of the respondents could not name a single form of IP. Copyright was identified by 20%, followed by patents at 16%, trademarks at 10% and designs and trade secrets at 1% each.