What You Need to Do, Legally, As an Application Developer

Okay, let’s say you were able to make that Android application. Now you should know that your Android application is your personal intellectual property, which means that you or your company has “intangible rights” to your creative work. Knowing your personal intellectual property rights can protect you from imitators who are out to get a quick buck from your application. For example, if someone steals your icon, graphics, or idea, knowing your rights could help you file an appropriate lawsuit to recover from the theft of your intellectual property.

What sort of rights do you want? You want something that can be obtained as quickly and accurately as possible in order to protect your investment. As you know, Android applications can be created in a very short period of time, and with new versions of Android coming out approximately every six months, it is difficult to see where the market is headed.

This last section of the chapter provides a summary of what to do to protect yourself legally. It is based on Chapter 3 of The Business of iPhone and iPad App Development, by Dave Wooldridge and Michael Schneider (Apress, 2011). (Michael Schneider, who wrote Chapter 3, is a successful lawyer and app-maker). All quotes are taken from his work.

Copyrights

A copyright is when a writer is granted “the right to dictate who can copy, distribute, publicly perform, modify, or create derivative works from their original work of authorship.” In legal terms, the moment that you put your pen to the paper, or start typing, copyright protection is automatically granted. Copyright can protect things like source code, graphics, sound effects, and other creative works you put in your application, but it does not protect any facts or ideas that are not used in a creative or artistic way.

Obtaining a copyright can give you a base level of protection that would come in handy when suing an obvious imitator of your ideas. The emphasis in that last sentence would be obvious, as copyright protection can extend to cases when your competitor is stealing graphics from the icon or the application itself, but does not apply when an imitator’s application is merely based on the same underlying idea as yours.

The current filing fee is about $65, but it can be lower ($35) if filed online. You can file online at www.copyright.gov/eco/, and get a lot of your questions answered in the tutorial at www.copyright.gov/eco/eco-tutorial.pdf.

Trademarks

Now let’s talk about trademarks. Trademarks are intended to keep others from confusing your company with anyone else. A trademark does not protect a concept or idea, but it will protect your name and logo. In today’s market, logos and icons are crucial. Think about companies like McDonald’s, Microsoft, and, for the sake of argument, Google’s Android division. No doubt images of their logos come to mind—the golden arches, the Windows symbol, and that green robot guy, respectively.

Trademark rights are like copyright rights: they go into effect the moment you use a name or symbol as an identifier for the source of your Android application. However, you might want to get better protection by filing a trademark registration with the US Patent and Trademark Office, in case you ever need to pursue a trademark action to federal court. You can find out more at http://uspto.gov.

Protecting Your Trade Secrets

In developing your own personal intellectual property, there are some things that you probably wouldn’t divulge to the average person. I know that as a professional blogger, I don’t state my business contacts on my individual blog posts, and I have strategies that I don’t share with everyone. This is why there is trade-secret law.

There are various ways of protecting trade secrets. If you have people working for you or with you on your Android application, then they need to know the importance of keeping all their information on private drives and servers, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to ask them to sign confidentiality agreements, also known as nondisclosure agreements (NDAs).

Is a Patent Right for You?

Now that I’ve briefly discussed the laws of copyright, patents, and trademarks, let’s go into patents. A patent grants an inventor the right to stop other people from using, making, or exporting the subject of an invention. It is not recommended that most Android developers get their own patents, as obtaining one is an extremely costly venture.

If you have an application that you know will be pertinent in the next few years, and will seriously change things, then a patent might be the way to go. However, the average patent costs about $10,000, and in order to obtain one, your invention must be “new and useful, and you must be able to describe it in a way that would allow a person reasonably skilled in the invention’s area to make the invention work.”

Another option is the provisional patent application, for which you can send a basic description of your invention to the patent office to establish an early effective filing date if you wish to file a full patent application on the invention itself. It is pretty weak as far as legally enforceable rights are concerned, but it gives you the right to use that “patent-pending” term that you see attached to many product ads. In case you are wondering what it means, it tells potential competitors that there is a patent application in the works on your product and/or service. You can file for a provisional patent application online through this web site: https://efs.uspto.gov/efile/portal/efs-unregistered.