Every year, September 19 is official Talk Like a Pirate Day. At ACT | The App Association, we celebrate with a pirate-themed event to raise awareness about the importance of safeguarding intellectual property from piracy.
This year was no different. More than 170 piratical personages joined us at Hawk ‘n’ Dove for drinks, light bites, and discussions of the importance of intellectual property protection, copyright, and other policies important to our small business member companies.
Our steadfast captain and president, Morgan Reed, spoke about intellectual property protections for small businesses. A translated version of his pirate-coded prose reads “Remember, it’s cool to talk like a pirate, but not to act like one.” We are thrilled to see the engagement with such an important issue for small businesses every year.
Intellectual property protection ensures that small technology businesses are protected from copycats and that their value is safeguarded. For many small tech companies, their intellectual property represents a great deal of their value before a product becomes marketable. And even after a business becomes successful, their intellectual property remains a significant asset that factors into potential sales or mergers. Small businesses need strong intellectual property protection to ensure they can continue to build innovative products.
In addition to basic protection for copyrights, scallywags targeting and abusing small business innovators who simply use standardized technologies to innovate need to be avast’ed. Standards are established norms or requirements for interoperability, ensuring software, devices, and other elements can interoperate with 5G, Wi-Fi, and even power outlets. Thousands of patents can be included in any given standard (called standard-essential patents, SEPs), and small businesses must be able to license those SEPs on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (or FRAND) terms, as voluntarily promised by the patent holder.
If you were able to join us at this year’s program, we are glad you could be there! If you weren’t able to make it, we hope to see you next year for a bit o’ grog and some chat about intellectual property.