Intellectual property rights security agreement
Document overview
- Length:8 pages (2450 words)
- Available in:Microsoft Word DOCXApple PagesRTF
If the document isn’t right for your circumstances for any reason, just tell us and we’ll refund you in full immediately.
We avoid legal terminology unless necessary. Plain English makes our documents easy to understand, easy to edit and more likely to be accepted.
You don’t need legal knowledge to use our documents. We explain what to edit and how in the guidance notes included at the end of the document.
Email us with questions about editing your document. Use our Lawyer Assist service if you’d like our legal team to check your document will do as you intend.
Our documents comply with the latest relevant law. Our lawyers regularly review how new law affects each document in our library.
About this intellectual property security agreement
Use this document to help you prevent a contractor or his staff from stealing your intellectual property. You may have software or formulae worth R billions or you may simply want to protect the IP in a modest business. Your valuable IP could be anything at all: legal document templates; chemical formulae; photographs; software; or any other.
You may be a large corporation or an individual business owner. The document you need is here, to protect your IP.
This document template is suitable to use where your counter party is a contractor. For employees use: IP security agreement: employee
You may use this document either stand-alone or by incorporating relevant terms into your usual standard contracts. This is not a contract for actual work. It is more in the nature of a high level confidentiality agreement. By all means use any time, but particularly when you hire a person to work on a particular project, alongside a service contract. Most importantly, this contract does not just cover your contractor, but compels him to accept liability for his staff – even when they act outside their employment. Furthermore, it is worded so as to include both past and future work.
New intellectual property may be created as the contract runs. This agreement makes sure that it becomes yours – even if an employee of the contractor thinks otherwise.
What is more, for your best protection, the contractor binds his own staff to the terms of this deal. In summary, there is no way that either a contractor or his staff can steal your intellectual property. That way, you are able to sue the contractor for unlawful acts of his employees or sub-contractors.
The law relating to ownership of intellectual property in newly created rights varies from country to country, so it is particularly important to use this agreement as part of any arrangement for supply from outside South Africa.
For double certainty, the ownership question is enforced by a long-stop provision for the forced legal transfer to you of any rights that he could still argue about.
This agreement covers all variations and situations by absolute clarity of the proposition that the payer owns all the IP rights he has paid for. This is enforced by a long-stop provision for the legal transfer of whatever rights could slip through the net.
The agreement moves seamlessly through confidentiality, particular projects, “work for hire” and past and future intellectual property.
Key features
- Professionally drawn, tough law
- Easy to edit (as always with Net Lawman documents)
- Thorough coverage of legal areas
- Practical, alternative business provisions
- No requirement for you to be your own lawyer
Alternatives to this IP security agreement
Net Lawman offers around 20 licence agreements and assignments relating to intellectual property in addition to those in website terms and conditions.
You can find the full selection at:
Intellectual property assignment agreements
Intellectual property licence agreements
Contents of this IP security agreement
Here is a list of the major subjects covered in this agreement:
- Definitions and interpretation
- Confidentiality - in depth
- “Work made for hire”
- Inventions already made
- New intellectual property
- Use of sub contractors
- Undertaking not to compete unfairly
- Other matters relating to enforcement and other legal issues
Over 1,950 words of helpful drafting notes.
Recent reviews
Choose the level of support you need
Document Only
- This document
- Detailed guidance notes explaining how to edit each paragraph
Lawyer Assist
- This document
- Document with guidance notes explaining how to edit each paragraph
- Unlimited email support - ask our legal team any question related to completing the document
- Review of your edited document by our legal team including:
- reporting on whether your changes comply with the law
- answering your questions about how to word a new clause or achieve an outcome
- checking that your use of defined terms is correct and consistent
- correcting spelling mistakes
- reformatting the document ready to sign
All rights reserved