Eight IP mistakes entrepreneurs make, and what they cost

Each of these is common, each is cheap to avoid, and each one turns expensive at exactly the moment the business starts working.

1. Filing the trademark too late

Trademark rights in the EU go to whoever files first, not to whoever used the name first.

The sequence is always the same: build the name for two years, get traction, discover somebody else registered it. Then the options are buying it, fighting for it, or changing the name after customers have learned it.

Cost of avoiding it: €1,530 for an EU trademark, or about €895 if you qualify for the EUIPO SME Fund.

Cost of not: a rebrand, or an acquisition at whatever the holder asks.

2. Protecting one country and selling in twelve

Trademark rights are territorial. A Spanish registration stops nobody in Germany, and since Brexit an EU registration stops nobody in Britain.

Work out where you actually sell, and where you will sell in two years. One EU trademark covers 27 states for €1,530. A UK registration is €715 on top.

3. Assuming a company name is a trademark

They are different registers doing different jobs. A company registration lets you trade under a name. A trademark lets you stop other people using it.

Registering the company does not clear the name, and it does not protect it. Plenty of businesses discover this when a letter arrives from someone who did file.

4. No written IP assignment from contractors

This is the one that kills funding rounds.

Under most EU laws, the person who creates a work owns the copyright unless a contract says otherwise. If a freelance designer made your logo, a contractor wrote your code, or an agency shot your photography, and there is nothing in writing assigning the rights, they may still own them.

Get the assignment in writing before work starts. Retrofitting it means going back to people who can now name their price, or who cannot be found.

5. Skipping NDAs, or using one that does nothing

Sharing the idea with a manufacturer, a developer or a potential partner without anything in writing means relying on their goodwill.

An NDA is not a formality. Check that it names the confidential information with some precision, sets a term, says what happens on termination, and is governed by a law and court you could realistically use.

6. Ignoring what the product looks like

A trademark protects the name. It does not protect the shape of the product, its packaging, its pattern or its interface.

That is what a registered design does, for €830 across the EU. There is a twelve-month grace period from first public disclosure, after which your own launch destroys the novelty of your own design.

For virtual goods and NFTs, the classification rules are their own problem: how EUIPO classifies them.

7. Waiting for a lawyer until something has gone wrong

The cheap moments are before you commit to a name, before you sign a contract, and before you file.

A clearance search is €358. An opposition, once somebody else's mark has published, starts at €790 plus office fees, and the outcome is far less certain.

8. Forgetting the website itself

Selling into the EU means a privacy policy that matches what you actually collect, a legal notice identifying who is behind the site, and a cookie banner that offers reject as plainly as accept.

Most of the ones we read describe processing the business does not do, copied from a template. That is its own compliance problem, not a solution to one.

What to do first

In order, if you are starting from nothing:

Check the name is free before you commit to it.
Register the domain.
File the trademark where you sell.
Get IP assignments in writing from everyone who has made anything for you.
Register the design if the look of the product matters.