On 22 October 2018, Vircon Legal co-founder Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu delivered the entrepreneurship seminar “Start-up Law within the Scope of Intellectual Property Rights” at SANTRAL (İstanbul Bilgi University).
For a technology company, the IP file is the company
Code, designs, datasets and brand are usually the only assets a startup owns, which makes their legal position the substance of any valuation. The recurring problem is not infringement by others; it is that the company never acquired what it thinks it owns. Work belongs to whoever created it unless a written assignment says otherwise — so the founder who wrote the prototype before incorporation, the freelancer paid on an invoice and the intern who built the site all retain rights until they sign them over. A short assignment at the point of engagement is the whole fix.
Trademarks deserve the same discipline: registering the name in the classes the business actually operates in, before someone else does, and checking availability before spending on brand. Patents suit some technologies and not others, and where they do not, trade-secret discipline — access controls, confidentiality terms, exit procedures — carries the weight instead. All of it surfaces in legal due diligence; see Intellectual Property and Startup Law in Türkiye.
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