A business plan is a written description of your business's future, a document that tells what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. If you jot down a paragraph on the back of an envelope describing your business strategy, you've written a plan, or at least the germ of a plan.

Business plans are inherently strategic. You start here, today, with certain resources and abilities. You want to get to a there, a point in the future (usually three to five years out) at which time your business will have a different set of resources and abilities as well as greater profitability and increased assets. Your plan shows how you will get from here to there.

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In general, copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection.

Even though registration is not a requirement for protection, the copyright law provides several inducements or advantages to encourage copyright owners to make registration.

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Start with a provisional patent application as a way to initiate the patent process because they are cheaper to prepare (because there are no formal requirements) and the filing fee due to the United States Patent Office at the time of filing is only $130 for small entities (i.e., individuals, universities and companies with 500 or fewer employees), which saves you several hundreds of dollars compared to the filing fees for a non-provisional patent application. Indeed, the filing fee is even less — just $65 — if you qualify as a small entity.

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While some inventors may hold intellectual property rights, such as patents, to protect their proprietary information, many entrepreneurs rely on trade secret protection early in the commercialization process. Non-disclosure agreements are fundamental to trade secret protection, as they demonstrate that inventors have taken reasonable steps to hold their valuable proprietary information in confidence.

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Deciding whether to patent an invention yourself or to hire a patent attorney is a difficult decision for inventors. Every year, thousands of inventors attempt to self-draft their own provisional patent application. However, a provisional patent application will not issue into a granted patent by itself and you still need to file a non-provisional patent application which is significantly more difficult to prepare than a provisional patent application. A provisional patent application has no specific format, whereas a non-provisional patent application has specific non-provisional patent application parts you must include and draft properly.

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