Even though your nonprofit organization was not set up to make a profit, it couldn't survive without some level of funding. Your ability to raise funds rests on your organization's reputation, identity, ideas, and creative works. In legal terms, the creative works produced by your organization are called intellectual property, or IP.

Consider Your IP Rights and Responsibilities

Intellectual property refers to certain types of creative products and ideas that are protected by federal laws from use infringement. The protected products include:

• Words, phrases, symbols, and designs
• Intangible assets such as musical, literary, and artistic works
• Discoveries and inventions

Some common IP rights are copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.

The cost of failing to consider IP issues can be great. Your IP assets could be easily lost or abandoned if your organization does not take care to protect them. Also, nonprofit organizations are not immune to claims of IP infringement, and an IP dispute could be a significant setback for your organization. A dispute would take precious time away from working toward your organization's core mission. It could also put a crippling dent in your budget.

Protect Your Organization's Brand

Your organization's IP helps to protect your organization's brand. Your organization's brand and name can have a significant impact on your organization's success. Nearly everything your organization does contributes to your organization's brand, from your public relations and fundraising efforts, to your communications, membership and organizational development efforts, and government relations work.

Your organization can leverage the trust and reputation associated with its brand to advance your mission, raise funds, support new projects, and forge partnerships. You can protect your organization's brand image through careful planning, management, and enforcement of your IP rights. Therefore, it is crucial that your organization take steps to protect its IP.

Protecting yourself and your organization's reputation may be easier than you think. Take a few minutes to learn about common IP issues related to your educational outreach materials, historical photographs, and archives by reviewing these FAQs about IP.

Respect the IP Rights of Others

In addition to protecting your own IP content, you should also take care to respect the IP rights of other people and organizations. Most people are aware that they should not take credit for someone else's original text or images, or to publish someone else's content without getting the owner's permission. However, the web makes it remarkably easy (and tempting) to copy and freely share content. This happens so frequently that many people are unaware of the copyright protections that apply to web content.

One of the most important but confusing provisions of copyright law for nonprofit organizations is the doctrine of "fair use." The fair use provision allows someone to make limited use of another person's copyrighted work without getting permission from the owner or creator of the work as long as the work is used for certain purposes, including educational purposes. Many of your organizational communications will have the general purpose of educating the public, so you should understand the circumstances in which the fair use provision applies. Even when you are entitled to make use of others' content, it is courteous to notify the owner of the content about your intentions. You should also give credit to the author, artist, or photographer who created the content.

Although IP law is complex and ever-changing, you should make an effort to understand the basics of copyright law for nonprofit organizations. For more detailed information on IP rights issues, consult the U.S. Copyright Office or your preservation organization's legal representative.

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