Protecting digital intellectual property

'Digital assets' is a blanket term to cover everything that you own or have rights over that can be stored in a digital format. The range of material covered by the term is extensive and growing, and includes:

• software
• original music
• photographs
• drawings
• film and video
• websites
• graphics
• technical data
• copyright publications

Digital assets can be created in a number of ways, including computers, digital cameras and audio systems, mobile phones and scanners.

Digital assets can be stored on computers or network servers, on remote hard drives, CDs, DVDs, tapes, portable storage media such as flash drives, and internet servers. Several of these storage media are inherently insecure, and since digital assets can be of considerable value to a business, it's important to take steps to protect them from unauthorised use.

This will allow the assets to be exploited, sold or licensed to create income streams.

Find out how to protect your intellectual property.