Opening and operating a brewery requires all kinds of physical assets, including kegs, boilers fermentation tanks, refrigeration, and waste treatment systems. But the intellectual property of your brewery is the most valuable part of your business. It’s also the piece that must be the most closely protected.

With more than 7,000 breweries in the United States, it is becoming more important than ever for breweries to protect their intellectual property. There are four primary areas of intellectual property: patents, trademarks, copyright, and trade secrets.

UVM’s Business of Craft Beer Professional Certificate program is offering a new five-week, online brewery course, Intellectual Property Protection in Craft Beer. The course, which starts on March 27, will be taught by Matthew McLaughlin, an attorney specializing in alcohol licensing and regulatory matters, as well as corporate, finance, and intellectual property matters for craft breweries.

The course will examine a range of legal issues involving copyrights, trademarks, and employment law to secure intellectual property.

For a brewery, intellectual property can include a beer’s name, packaging design and trade secrets. Copyright protects original works of authorship, such as literary, musical and artistic works, but generally doesn’t protect general facts or lists of ingredients. A trademark covers unique words, phrases, designs, or symbols that identify the source of a product.

Meanwhile, trade secret protection applies to any confidential business information that provides a competitive advantage. A trade secret could include anything from beer recipes or brewing methods to confidential information about sales or distribution.

Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are set for a finite amount of time. But McLaughlin says trade secrets can be protected forever.

“There are two schools of thought on trade secrets. One is that beer recipes can be found on the Internet, so they are public and can’t be protected,” McLaughlin says. “But if a brewery is doing something that is different and their recipe is confidential, then the brewery should take the effort to protect it.”

The UVM course will also cover employment law, something McLaughlin says is often overlooked by breweries in intellectual property protection. One way to protect intellectual property is for brewery employees to be required to sign a confidentiality or non-compete agreement.

“If a brewer doesn’t require employees to sign these agreements, then it’s difficult to say the brewer was adequately protecting trade secrets,” he says. “A lot of brewers don’t want to make employees bound to such an agreement, and this is one of those things that is a primary issue in trade secret protection.”

When it comes to a brewery’s branding and identity, McLaughlin says there are many breweries that don’t do any research when choosing a name of a beer or even a name for their brewery. If a brewery doesn’t register a name, it may be infringing on another brewery’s registered mark, which could result in a cease and desist letter.

“There are 7,000 breweries in the United States and so many different beers,” he says. “It’s getting more difficult to come up with creative names that haven’t been used in some variation.”

An attorney specializing in intellectual property can help a brewery research names to lessen the likelihood of a cease and desist. McLaughlin adds that an attorney can also assist with common labor and employment issues to protect trade secrets.

“If you’ve invested 20 years of your life and money to develop a brewery, you want to look back and know you did everything you could to protect your intellectual property,” McLaughlin says. “At end of the day, intellectual property is where the value is for your brewery—not the physical assets. It’s in your brewery’s name, story and brand

Each company solves the problem of staff shortages in its own way. Some develop tempting compensation packages and entice specialists from competing firms; others improve the system of training or invent special motivational programs. Each method has its pros and cons. A universal human resource management tool has not yet been invented. Leading world experts formulated the main directions in the selection of personnel, which will develop over the next couple of years.

In the modern world, most companies strive to find an employee for a certain amount of dollars as quickly as possible. Rare vacancies remain relevant for months. New employees were needed yesterday, so recruiters are no longer just waiting for feedback on posted ads, but taking the initiative in their own hands. About 85% of the audience for job search sites is “passive candidates.” They do not think seriously about the change of employer until they are presented with the opportunities and benefits of cooperation with another organization. John Sullivan, an HR consultant writes that:

“Instead of the resume, companies can work with the candidate’s profile in social networks, which will open the doors to candidates who are not actively searching for a new position.”

It is not important now what the organization says about itself, but it is decisive what people say about it. More and more employers come to the realization of this principle and are serious about working with the brand. In conformity with LinkedIn data, which were collected by interviewing more than 3,800 employees of HR departments around the world, in 2015 the development of the employer’s brand was a priority for 62% of companies. 59% of companies significantly increased their investments in relevant activities. In the last two years, this figure continued to grow and now this indicator does not lose its relevance.

The principle “the best work for the best” not only has not lost its relevance but is successfully implemented in the life of the absolute majority of companies.

Secondly, directly during the interview, focus the attention of the recruiter on the fact that you plan to grow inside the company. This does not mean that you have to dream about the SEO’s post. You can successfully build a horizontal career.

Third, allocate time and investment in the formation of a personal brand. Declare yourself in a professional environment as an expert, and your chances of getting into the dream organization will increase substantially.