Most founders protect their intellectual property too late. The brand goes out, the code ships, a contractor builds the first version, and only when an investor's lawyer asks "who actually owns this?" does anyone check. By then the cheap fixes have gone.
This is a UK guide, written for where things stand in 2026. Two things changed this year that older advice misses. UKIPO fees went up across the board on 1 April 2026, so the cost of registering is higher than most online guides still say. And the rules on AI and copyright are openly unsettled, which matters whether you are training a model or just worried about your content being scraped. We will cover both, after the basics.
The six types of IP, in UK terms
Intellectual property is not one thing. It is a set of separate rights, some automatic and some you have to register. A startup usually holds several at once without realising it. Here is the full picture for the UK.
| Right | What it protects | Automatic or registered | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trade mark | Your brand: name, logo, sometimes a sound or colour | Registered | 10 years, renewable forever |
| Patent | How an invention works, if it is new and non-obvious | Registered | Up to 20 years |
| Registered design | The look of a product: shape, pattern, appearance | Registered | Up to 25 years |
| Copyright | Original work: code, text, music, images, databases | Automatic | Life of author plus 70 years |
| Design right | The shape of a product, unregistered | Automatic | Up to 15 years |
| Trade secret | Confidential know-how, recipes, methods, data | Automatic, if you keep it secret | As long as it stays secret |
One correction worth making straight away, because the point trips up founders who have read overseas guides. In the UK you do not register copyright and you cannot. It exists the moment you write the code or create the work, for free. There is no copyright office to file at. What you can do is keep dated records and mark your work, which helps you prove ownership later.
What registering actually costs in 2026
If you are going to register a trade mark, patent or design, the official UKIPO fees rose on 1 April 2026, by around a quarter for trade marks. These are the government filing fees only, charged online and direct. Professional fees, if you use a trade mark or patent attorney, sit on top.
| UKIPO online fee | Before | From 1 April 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Trade mark application, one class | £170 | £205 |
| Each additional class | £50 | £60 |
| Trade mark renewal, one class | £200 | £245 |
| Patent application, paid on filing | £60 | £75 |
| Patent search | £150 | £200 |
| Registered design, one design | £50 | £60 |
A trade mark is the one almost every startup should do early, and it is the best value. For £205 you can register your name or logo in one class of goods or services, through the UKIPO's own service, with no attorney needed for a straightforward mark. Pick the right classes, because the registration only covers what you list. A patent is a different order of cost and effort: the official fees are modest, but getting to grant with an attorney usually runs into thousands, and the process takes years. Register a design if the look of your product matters, because it is cheap and quick.
The mistake that sinks deals: who owns your IP
The single most expensive IP error UK startups make is not failing to register. It is not owning the thing they think they own. This surfaces at exactly the wrong moment, during investor or acquirer due diligence, and it can stall or kill a deal.
The UK rules are specific and they are not intuitive:
- Employees: IP created by an employee in the course of their job usually belongs to the company automatically, under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act and the Patents Act. Good news, mostly.
- Contractors and freelancers: this is the trap. A freelance developer or designer keeps the copyright in what they make unless they sign it over to you in writing. Pay someone to build your app without an assignment clause, and they, not you, own the code.
- Founders: work done before the company existed, on a laptop at home, belongs to the individual until it is formally assigned to the company. Investors expect to see those assignments in place.
The fix is cheap and boring: a written IP assignment from every founder, contractor and agency into the company, signed and dated. Do it as you go, not the week before a funding round. If you are still at the idea stage, our guide on validating a startup idea before you build is the right place to start thinking about this, before any code is written by anyone.
Protect it before you file, not after
Patents and registered designs reward secrecy before filing. If you make your invention public before you file, through a demo, a pitch, a trade show or a press article, you can destroy the novelty that a patent needs. The invention becomes "known," and you lose the right to patent it. This catches founders who pitch widely before protecting anything.
Two habits prevent it. Use a non-disclosure agreement before you share anything sensitive with a partner, supplier or potential hire. And file at least a first patent application before any public disclosure, which sets your priority date and starts a 12-month clock to file more widely. If you are pitching investors, remember that a startup pitch deck shown to a room is a disclosure, so keep the patentable detail out of it.
AI and your IP: where the UK stands in 2026
This is the part no older guide covers, and it is moving. There are two separate questions, and startups are on both sides of them.
If you use AI to create
Work generated purely by AI, with no meaningful human authorship, sits in a grey area. The UK is unusual in that its copyright law has long had a provision for "computer-generated works," which assigns authorship to the person who made the arrangements for the work to be created, with protection running 50 years. But whether a prompt counts as enough human input, and who owns the output, is contested and under review. The safe position for now: keep a human materially involved in anything you need to own, document that involvement, and check the terms of the AI tools you use, because some grant you rights to outputs and some do not.
If your content is being scraped
Here the law is genuinely unsettled. The government ran a consultation proposing a text-and-data-mining exception that would let AI developers train on copyrighted work unless the owner opted out. The creative industries fought it hard. In January 2026 ministers publicly stepped back, calling it a reset, and a required report and economic impact assessment followed under the Data (Use and Access) Act. A Creative Content Exchange, a licensing route for some cultural content, is being piloted. Meanwhile the High Court's 2025 ruling in Getty v Stability AI left the core training question unresolved, with an appeal pending.
For a startup, the practical read is this. There is no settled UK rule that says training on your content is or is not infringement, so do not assume you are protected, and do not assume you are free to train on others' work. If your own content has value, set your terms of use and robots policy to state your position on AI training now, because an opt-out regime may yet arrive and you want the record to show you reserved your rights.
The Brexit trap most guides still get wrong
An EU trade mark or registered Community design no longer covers the UK. If you only hold EU rights, you are not protected in Britain, and the reverse is also true. A UK startup selling into Europe needs to file in both the UK and the EU for full coverage, which doubles the cost but closes the gap.
Designs carry a sharper version of this. Where you first show a new design can decide where you get automatic unregistered protection. Disclose it first in the UK and you may secure UK rights but weaken your EU position, and vice versa. If the look of your product matters and you sell on both sides, take advice on the order of disclosure before you launch, or simply register the design, which removes the guesswork.
Trade secrets and NDAs
Not everything should be registered. Some of your most valuable IP, a method, a dataset, a pricing model, is worth more kept secret than disclosed in a patent, which publishes the detail to the world. UK trade secrets are protected by the Trade Secrets Regulations 2018 and the older law of confidence, but only if you actually treat the information as confidential. That means NDAs with staff and partners, access controls, and marking sensitive material as confidential. A secret you have not protected is not a trade secret.
Getting money back from your IP
IP is not only a cost. Two UK schemes turn it into value. The Patent Box lets a company pay a reduced 10% rate of corporation tax on profits earned from patented inventions, against a main rate of 25%, which is a strong reason to patent if your product is patentable and profitable. R&D tax relief sits alongside it for the development work itself. And the UK Intellectual Property Office runs support for smaller businesses, including subsidised IP audits that map what you own and where the gaps are. For founders still setting up, these fit into the wider picture covered in our guide for registering your first UK tech company.
A simple order of play
You do not need to do everything at once. Sequence it by stage:
- Before you build: buy the domain and key social handles, run a free trade mark and company name search, and get NDAs ready.
- As you build: get signed IP assignments from every founder, contractor and agency, and keep secrets secret.
- Before you launch: file your trade mark, file any patent before public disclosure, and register designs if the look matters.
- As you grow: file in the EU and other markets you sell into, consider the Patent Box, and review the AI position as the rules firm up.
Intellectual property is one of the few assets a young company genuinely owns, and the cost of protecting it is tiny next to the cost of losing it in a dispute or a diligence process. Start early, assign everything into the company, and keep the record clean.
This guide is general information, not legal advice. IP decisions turn on your specific facts, so take professional advice before you file or sign anything.
