Intellectual Property an American Code of Business

Intellectual Property or IP is often a company's most valuable asset. Packaging is intimately involved in IP and early on in my career in South Africa, it was deemed of absolute importance that each brand retain its own image and structure, meaning, time and time again never change a component, given that many people were illiterate and thus the product's image and color was the only recognition point.

Package design can be the subject of trade dress protection or even copyright protection and patents are used to protect structures, designs and how to make the product.

Thus trade dress, copyright and a patent can be what differentiates your product from another and more important consumer recognition.

Our PGS machine group has many patents around machine improvements in pouch making. Huge savings are involved with the use of these patents.

The Redi-2-DrinQ ShotPaQ™ companies use trade dress IP to protect the overall look of a pouch package, including its size, shape, materials and label.

It can be infringed if someone copies it so closely that "the public is likely to be confused about who made the product". This is considered unfair competition and could cost the loss of product sales.

The Redi-2-DrinQ ShotPak® brands are patented and pouch trade dress is protected. Some of our customer pouches have the same protection.

It nevertheless is a surprise to us when major Corporations have total disregard for IP and pay lip service to an authors expression of an idea.

We have recently seen a patented pouch design copied 100% and worse the initials of the product owner's company also copied to further confuse the public into believing the new product is part of the original. This is easily defined as IP theft.

So what can be done? First is to go the legal route and then in today's social experience world is let as many consumers know that the little guys idea is being stolen, and maybe ask for support by not buying any of the offending party's product lines until they agree to change.

Sort of guilty verdict by the masses and showing the offending Corporation we are not supporting your lack of morality any more.

This is pretty deep, and in the old days the public hardly ever knew of these infringements. So using the world wide web and all the social sites we are considering a web page to list these offending large Corporations and their supporters, who have a total disrespect for IP in the USA. We will appeal to consumers to stop buying any of their products.

Let me know your comments.