“All designers worry about intellectual property,” said Barbara Finsness who owns the Island Shop with her husband Ken. “It doesn’t matter if you are designer of ceramic plates, or an engineer.”

Mrs. Finsness has designed more than 200 different products for her store and registered around 30 images from her collection. She is known for her pink cottages and butteries that can be found on everything from plates to tea towels.

“Because I have designed them myself I have a right to register them,” she said. “Particularly with items like linen, embroidery and ceramic plates. I could not register a hibiscus and say no one else could put a hibiscus on an embroidery towel because that is too broad a scope. I could say ‘I have a pink cottage and that is my thing’. There is another artist who is now doing pink cottages on towels. I could have some legal grounds to look into that. She is not using my exact artwork, but she is very close. I could pursue that.”

She said the intellectual property laws here give her the opportunity to at least address those problems. A few years ago, Mrs. Finsness had a problem with a tie design offered by the now defunct Trimingham Bros.

“Trimingham’s copied a tie design of mine years ago, and changed it slightly and did it in polyester instead of silk,” she said. “We decided it probably wasn’t worth pursuing them legally.”

She did confront Trimingham’s and was told that someone in China had come up with the same idea.

“It was very far fetched,” she said. “I put them on notice that I knew what they were doing and I didn’t appreciate it. It is a moot point now.”

She said any artist retains the legal rights to her artwork, unless she specifically signs away those rights.

Artists can register their images and designs with the Intellectual Property department in the Registry General’s office.

“Registering your artwork enforces your rights,” Mrs. Finsness said. “The process of registering your artwork is not complicated. You go down with your actual pieces of artwork. There is a price, but we consider it well worth it.”

Mrs. Finsness said she also registered the store name, ‘The Island Shop’. Unfortunately, one local hotel seems to have overlooked this, and is now using the same store name.

“We do have the right to use that exclusively,” she said. “It is up to us to advise the shop that they need to stop using this name. We will look at a situation and if it gets to be out of hand, and it gets to confusion, we will take legal action.”

Intellectual property laws are particularly an issue for people in the entertainment industry. A movie is released in the United States on one day, and the next day, bootleg copies are being released in another country.

Al Seymour, Jr. runs an animation and production company called Seymour Artists that has produced a number of animated local commercials, and also three animated short films that appeared in the Bermuda International Film Festival.

“If you want to produce a DVD and you don’t have macro vision encryption on it, then anyone can easily rip the DVD,” said Mr. Seymour. “Even with that kind of protection you are not fully protected. If someone really wants to copy what you have, they will find a way. These guys are professional pirates.”

He said under British law, if you put a P for protection or a C for copyright next to your product name, it is protected and copyrighted.

Mr. Seymour said it is not the big animation studios that steal ideas and artwork. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid such accusations.

“It is to the point where the big studios will not accept any ideas from outside the studio, because they don’t want to take that chance,” he said. “If I sent them an idea for Seinfeld, they would send it back unopened.”

Unfortunately, some businesses in Bermuda, are not above stealing intellectual property. Mr. Seymour said some people in Bermuda, think they are out of reach of international intellectual property laws.

“I remember back in the 1980s, a store used a Lionel Richie song in their commercials,” said Mr. Seymour. “They got a letter from the record company saying they must cease and desist. So the big companies in the United States do notice. Right now there is a commercial airing that is clearly violating intellectual property laws, but nothing is being done about it. You are only allowed to sample a certain number of bars from a song, you can’t use the whole thing without permission. People here do abuse these laws because there is no real policing of them.”

Mr. Seymour said when he made his film, ‘Paper Byes’ he replicated it on DVD through a company in New Jersey.

“I had to fill out a special property form,” he said. “I had to prove that all the material and music was mine or produced by people who worked for me.”

Copyrighted music and video is one thing, but what about food? Grant Kennedy and Joel McDonell run the Bermuda Jam Factory which produces a line of jams called Gombey Pepper Jams.

It is difficult to copyright recipes, but the pair have legally protected many other aspects of their business such as their logo, name and packaging design.

“It is very important to protect what we have created,” said Mr. McDonell. “We spent a lot of time putting the ideas together, so we have to work to protect them if they are going to work well and perform well.”

Mr. Kennedy said the product names and logo which features a chilli pepper wearing a gombey hat, are important commodities.

“The logos and names are a big aspect of our product, so it is crucial to protect them,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. McDonell said when they first started brainstorming ideas over three years ago, they weren’t trying to copy anyone, they were looking for something unique to offer the public.

“We really didn’t think much about protecting our products at first,” said Mr. McDonell. “Then we met a lady from the Intellectual Property department at Harbour Night. She asked us if we had protected our logos and things.”

Mr. McDonell and Mr. Kennedy were invited to a meeting in the Intellectual Property office. “The lady there had some good suggestions and pointers,” said Mr. Kennedy. “She just basically listened, and advised us to protect this and that.

“It is difficult to copyright a recipe, so they were advised to keep our recipes close to our hearts. You can’t copyright a spoonful of this and a pinch of that, but you can copyright the process.”

They were told to legally protect and register three main aspects of their products, the whole front label as a complete package, the name of the product and the logo itself.

In the last three years the Gombey Pepper Jam products have really taken off in the community and beyond. Being legally registered in Bermuda and abroad has become particularly important as Bermuda Jam Factory plans to soon release their products in the United States. “We have had interest from American retailers,” said Mr. Kennedy. “The Gombey Pepper Jam went over well at a food festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico. People there ate it up.”

Their triangle-shaped packages of jams have been particularly successful. In fact, they sold out last Christmas, and have only just got these special offerings back in stock.

For more information about registering your products in Bermuda, contact the Intellectual Property office at 297-7708 or go to http://www.ipo.gov.uk/.