Julian Hakes:Mojito Shoes
In my first year at Law school I came up with a brilliant (or so I thought) idea for a ladies shoe. It was truly way before its time! I received a letter through my door on a random winter day about a company in Europe which did research and development on innovative products. With the naivety of youth, I happily posted them my drawings and a brief description of how the invention worked.
It took six months before I got a response stating that they had assessed the product of my virtuoso and all they needed was $500 to do a thorough market research. With my malnourished pockets, this was someone’s idea of a sick joke. Poof! Went my dreams.
Fast forward 8 years later and there on my T.V screen is a story on CNN about the same shoe (the spawn of my creative genius) being peddled around New York!
Those were rookie days when Intellectual Property sounded like a corporation selling smart houses. In this day and age, we are a lot more aware about how to protect the expression of our ideas and inventions. But, there are many naïve mini ME’s still being bewitched by such trickery.
Protect your creation at all costs. If it is an invention by all means find out how to patent it. If you can’t afford this, then by all means ‘Do Not’ put it out there until you can.
IPquail 