How much will you protect your intellectual property?

During one of our lectures in class, we talked about ways to protect intellectual property. If I remember correctly, these were the four ways: Trade Secrets, Copyright, Trademark, and Patents. When considering how to protect my intellectual property, these were the four ways I considered.

To start off, I think nothing with my product would fall under trade secrets. When I think of trade secrets, I think of something like the recipe for Coca Cola or Krabby Patty's so maybe I don't have the perfect understanding of what a trade secret is, but like I said before I don't think nothing with my product would fall under trade secrets. As a reminder, my product will be an application that helps students find parking spots on campus.

Similarly, I don't think there would be anything I would patent with regards to my product. Maybe if I develop a some unique algorithm, but i don't really see that happening. I just don't think I need to do that for my product. That leaves trademarks and copyright.

For my application, I would definitely generate a unique name and logo, so I would probably trademark those. Furthermore, I would copyright the code for the application. By doing this, I think I could avoid people stealing my idea. Of course, this is just after a bit of thinking. As I get deeper into developing my product, more things may arise that would need to be protected, but this is all I can think of right now.

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