Freedom-to-Operate Checklist

About This Template

The goal of this checklist is to ensure that you are not infringing on any existing rights from other companies.‍

Important before we jump in: This is not legal advice. We recommend you seek advice from a legal counsel in your country of incorporation.

This involves checking for existing:

1. Patents that protect inventions and innovation that you want to use in your product
2. Trade secrets that protect proprietary information that you might use to build a product/business
3. Copyrights that protect the rights of artistic work that you might use in your product
4. Trademarks that protect brand-defining elements
5. Components that limit your marketing

Patents

✅ Ensure that the technology you want to use in your product is not already patented by doing an initial patent search on Google Patents.

✅ As a student or academic researcher ensure that the university has no rights to your inventions during your time at University.

Trade secrets

✅ Founders and early employees have no existing non-compete clauses.

✅ The knowledge needed to build the product/business is not protected by any existing NDA

©️ Copyrights

✅ The artistic material (e.g. images, audio files) you are using in your product or website is not protected by copyrights. If they are make sure you license them.

™️ Trademarks

✅ Your brand/company/product name is not protected by any existing copyright

✅ For US trademarks check: https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search

✅ For EU trademark check: https://euipo.europa.eu/‍

✅ For Swiss trademarks check: https://database.ipi.ch/database-client/search/query/trademarks

✅ UK, Canada, Australia

📣 Freedom to market

✅ Do you have a brand/company/product name that is uniquely identifiable and Google searches for the name will not give any/few results?

✅ Is your .com / .ai / .io URL available?

✅ Are social media accounts/available for your search