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4 Ways to Protect Intellectual Property When Hiring Freelancers

Posted: 09 Feb 2020 10:00 PM PST

In this day and age, much work is done online rather than in the office. And when companies are looking to get the job done quickly, they will often turn to online freelancers to outsource work while they focus on the big-picture.  

Today, there are almost 60 million freelancers in the United States to fill these roles, and the number is expected to grow, according to a new recent report from Freelancers Union and Upwork.  

While hiring freelancers is a great way to be able to get specific tasks done without having to hire more full-time employees, there are many things that you need to take into consideration before posting a job on a freelance website. After all, you don't want an employee, freelancer, or independent contractor who created the work to use it for purposes other than the one you hired them for.

We will explain below what rights you have in the work that's created for you by others, as well as how you can protect your work, idea, or invention from being used or sold by the freelancer creating the work on your behalf.

1. Copyright your work

In the United States, copyright law allows the creators of original works of art, such as literary works, graphic works, movies, songs, and books to control who makes, sells, and displays the work they've created. 

The ownership of work that is created "for hire," belongs to the individual who commissioned the work and not the author. This is so because U.S copyright law states that "work made for hire" is owned by the party that commissioned the work. For example, if you have someone design a web page for you, write content for your website, or create a graphic for you, your work is automatically protected under U.S copyright law. The web page, content, or graphics produced will be owned by the party commissioning or paying the freelancer to create the work. 

Now suppose you have an employee who creates something on his own time, you do not own the work he creates unless there is a contractual agreement that states otherwise. However, if the work created by the employee is within the scope of his employment, his employer is considered to be the author of the work.

So, what does that mean for you as someone who hires a freelancer or remote author? The freelancer who created the work does not have the right to sell or display the work he created for you. However, if the piece of work the freelancer created for you is extremely important, you should register it with the copyright office. 

The benefit of registering it as copyright is that you'll be able to sue anyone who misuses your work for copyright infringement. This will deter anybody from reproducing your work without your authorization. Copyright Law protects artwork throughout the life of the author, plus an additional 70 years. 

Here are a few examples of artwork that the party commissioning the work may own:

  • An article
  • A motion picture
  • Movie
  • Book
  • Song
  • Translation of a text
  • Sound recordings

2. Patent your invention

If you hired a freelancer or an independent contractor to create an invention for you, you might be wondering who owns the invention or the patent protecting the invention. 

Under U.S patent law, the creator of an invention is presumed to be the owner. So, for you to obtain patent rights, you must have the inventor execute an assignment agreement for him to assign his interest (ownership rights) to you. Patenting your invention is a good way to stop the individuals who helped you create it from replicating it for their own benefit. However, patenting even a straightforward invention can be costly and take approximately two years from the day you file your nonprovisional utility patent application. 

If you have employees or independent contractors creating an invention on your behalf, make sure you sign an assignment agreement at the outset of the employment to ensure that the inventor assigns his ownership rights to his employer or party commissioning the work. 

Some states limit the power of assignment agreements. For example, in the state of California, an assignment agreement is not valid when it comes to transferring inventions that an inventor worked on during his own time, without using his employer's resources or intellectual property. Illinois and Washington have implemented rules that are similar to California's rules. 

If you're working with a freelancer or remote employee or independent contractor, you should talk to an attorney about drafting an assignment agreement that's tailored to your specific situation. You should not rely on an employee to relinquish his rights to an invention; instead, have your employee sign an assignment agreement before hiring him. 

3. Consider trade secret law and confidentiality agreements

If you have a secret that you use in your business, you may want to protect it so that your competitors do not use it to compete with you. Coca Cola has kept its ingredients for its Coke a secret for over 85 years to avoid having competitors create a drink with a similar taste. 

So, if you have a secret that gives you a competitive edge, you should protect it as a trade secret. For trade secret protection to apply, all you need to do is ensure that you're keeping it confidential and that you're taking reasonable steps to keep it that way. 

If you need to share your secret with another party, an employee or freelancer, you should execute a non-disclosure agreement with the other party. A non-disclosure agreement is one where the party with whom you're sharing the information is not permitted to share the information with any third party, subject to the terms of the agreement. 

Although non-disclosure agreements do not guarantee that the second party will share the information with a third party, they do place a legal obligation on the second party. 

You can sue the other party if they breach (break) the agreement. If you're successful in your lawsuit against them, you may be able to recover any damages you sustained as a result of the breach of contract. 

4. Sign a legal contract

Contract law gives employers and individuals who hire freelancers or independent contractors the ability to protect the artistic works, ideas, or inventions that the freelancer creates while he's working for you. It's always good to have a contract in place. 

In a written contract, you can ask the freelancer to agree to relinquish his right to any work that he's doing on your behalf before beginning the job.

Your contract should set forth the terms of the employment, as well as the work that's to be performed by the freelancer. 

Another option to input into any contract that can further protect your intellectual property is that the freelancer in question must either return or destroy any materials they used to create their finished project. In making this stipulation, you can ensure that once your freelancer has satisfactorily done their work, you get back (or they destroy) everything that they used to do their job. This means that in the future, they will not have access to your intellectual property, and will thus be unable to use your project or ideas for their own benefit.

How VR And Immersive Learning Will Transform Training

Posted: 09 Feb 2020 09:00 PM PST

Virtual reality was routinely dismissed as a far-fetched fantasy only a few years ago, yet recent developments have turned it into one of the most viable and popular of new products to grace the marketplace in the last few years. Now that consumers and investors alike are hooked on VR, we're going to see an explosion in immersive learning in classrooms, businesses, and learning centers around the country.

From the military to top-notch universities, virtually everyone can benefit from the wonders of virtual reality. Here's how VR and immersive learning will transform training of all sorts in the near future.

Learn by doing

Perhaps the most enticing element of VR training regimes is that they enable employees to learn valuable new skills by doing a task over and over again in a simulated virtual environment. This is excellent for businesses that are looking to prepare workers for new responsibilities but can't afford to put them in the field for a variety of reasons. While early critics of VR technology argued that it would never be effective nor cheap enough to become a widespread facet of workplace training regimes, those criticisms have seen been dispelled now that VR is more accessible than ever before.

An analysis of VR and workplace training put forward by NPR illustrates that there are still some flaws to overcome; simulating tiny but important details isn't always achievable, for instance, and some workers are more comfortable with the technology than others. Despite these minor setbacks, however, virtual reality has made impressive gains in the last few years and is now clearly capable of becoming more refined and affordable as time goes on and new entrants to the market introduce innovations that reshape the current technological landscape.

It's not only businesses that are benefiting from VR training; the United States military has long recognized virtual reality tools as being crucially important when it comes to training the next generation of service members. Virtual reality is already changing military training in no small part because the military has been making use of simulators for much longer than most people in the commercial arena. Search and rescue operations can be simulated, complex vehicle training can be conducted at next to nothing in terms of costs, and custom capabilities can always be introduced to ensure that any imaginable scenario can be implemented into a training regime that depends on VR.

Those companies looking to foster work at height training or similar high-stress scenario training will thus likely take a page from the military's book and conduct such training safely and cheaply with VR technology. By allowing individuals to encounter high-stress scenarios that permit them to learn without actually exposing them to danger, VR technology will drastically cut down on the amount of workplace training accidents that occur in the private and public areas alike.

A new way of learning

Why is VR effective when it comes to learning, anyway? Mostly because of the "immersive learning" effect, or the fact that human beings pick things up much quicker than they otherwise would if they're immersed in a pro-learning environment that helps them achieve their objectives. VR technology has come a long way, and it wouldn't be accurate to describe them as clunky headsets that produce lackluster effects. The truth of the matter is that VR technology is now so advanced that it fully immerses users into a creative environment that stimulates their senses and enables them to absorb immense amounts of information in a relatively short period of time.

This is only possible because of advancements in artificial intelligence, which like VR was largely a sci-fi fiction just a decade ago but is now a regular facet of our economic system. By combining AI and VR, schools everywhere are personalizing learning to an unprecedented extent and enabling people of all ages to get more out of an educational experience than they ever could have before. Even those who typically don't like the classroom and shun formal learning methods may find themselves enthralled by VR technology and thus more open to new learning experiences.

Experiential learning, or coming to master something by doing it over and over again, will be made much easier now that VR technology is cheap and accessible to most companies. Classrooms often enable children to get hands-on experience, and formal company or military training regimes usually entail some sense of experiential learning. With portable VR technology, however, experiential learning can become the new norm at all times – people can gain hands-on experience not only when they're in the classroom or training workshop, but even when they're at home by relying upon their VR headsets.

As experiential learning becomes accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time, we can expect workers of the future to familiarize themselves with new topics or exercises much more quickly than we can expect these days. In other words, VR has effectively made it so that the classroom can follow you around wherever you go, which will ensure more frequent training occurs.

HR departments will adapt

These technological developments enabling VR to succeed like never before aren't happening in a vacuum; at the same moment that VR tech is plunging ahead at a breakneck pace, HR departments and training gurus across the world are also racing to update their training regimes. The future of employee training will be determined by those competent HR officials who are capable of familiarizing themselves with this new technology before it becomes commonplace. After this new generation of HR professionals comes into power, they'll be fostering VR-sponsored training efforts wherever they can, largely in an effort to cut costs while simultaneously bolstering the productivity of any given training program.

Divorcing employee training from physical space is thus going to be a regular facet of tomorrow's workplace training. New employees won't even have to show up at the office or factory to become skilled workers who know what to do – they'll simply have to download the latest training software and plug in from home to update themselves on the latest techniques and practices. HR departments will thus need to become more flexible than they currently are if they hope to remain relevant for long in this fast-changing world of ours.

The VR training market is going to swell to reach a mammoth $6.3 billion by 2022, according to ABI research, which puts into perspective just how important this industry will become in the next few months. After all, it was worth a mere $216 million in 2018, but the proven success of VR programs is now guaranteeing that companies, military officials, and private educators everywhere are scrambling to get their hands on VR training equipment as soon as possible. Those actors who don't get a head start on adapting to VR will thus find themselves left in the dust by their competitors sooner rather than later.

Will VR be applicable to every training program? While it may not become universally relied upon, VR technology is already digging its claws into a number of important industries, including the national security complex. As the next few years unfold, we'll see that we're just standing at the beginning of a VR revolution that's going to keep disrupting our educational and training norms for decades to come.
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