Intellectual Property in My Industry

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Intellectual Property exists in every industry throughout the world.  Intellectual Property has been put into place to protect the rights of business owners.  There some intellectual properties that people may be unaware of that may affect them in their industry.  It is very important to know these so you do not violate any of them and end up in a lawsuit or even worse arrested with charges.  In the energydrink industry there has been a recent incident in the Philippines that have a few people under arrest for violation of unfair competition. 

Energy Food & Drinks, Inc. had the exclusive rights to distribute Red Bull in the Philippines and T.C. Pharmaceutical Industries was the manufacturer of Red Bull and had its local distributor Maryland Distributors start distributing the energy drink.  TCPI has used MDI labels on the bottles of Red Bull that should have been EFDI, and this has led up to the lawsuit. 

This incident is very important for my company because we are currently working out an agreement with the owners of Cloud 9, which will give our company the exclusive rights to distribute Cloud 9 to the Las Vegas casinos.  Our ultimate goal is to have exclusive rights to distribute Cloud 9 through the United States.  We want to make sure we will not have an incidents were we can violate unfair competition.  We need to make sure Cloud 9 does not have any other distribution deals that could interfere with our exclusive rights deal.  Also, we want to make sure we have all of our paperwork in line to make sure we are protected and that another company cannot get the rights we have. 

EDFI and TCPI allegedly parted ways in 2009, but EDFI claims to have the exclusive rights since 1993, and they are currently the holders of certificate of product registration with the Food and Drug Administration.  This seems to be a case of making sure a company does its research and knows who has the rights to distribute, and again this a great case study for start up companies to make sure they do not end up in a situation like this.