ACID

What is ACID? Your voice against design theft

ACID is the UK's leading design and intellectual property campaigning organisation. We are a forward thinking trade association for designers and manufacturers; a not-for-profit organisation funded by membership fees.  Our aim is to provide cost effective tips, advice and guidelines to help our members protect their intellectual property to achieve growth through a proactive IP strategy. To retain the integrity of our membership, all potential members must be designers or have a design capability and the majority of their products must be designed either in-house or by commissioned designers.  We also welcome manufacturers to join ACID who have entered into licence agreements with freelance designers in which the intellectual property rights are assigned to the manufacturer.

Why ACID began

ACID's CEO Dids Macdonald was a successful product designer in the 1980's producing hand painted decorative accessories for top interior designers. It was a great success. But it came with a huge problem: theft. Every new design was knocked off by larger companies without any hope of redress. Like the vast majority of Britain's 350,000 design companies, they were a tiny outfit and not in a position to take on the unscrupulous thieves and copycats. They had no idea where to start.

So Dids and an IP lawyer who had helped her (Simon Clark) came up with another idea: to create a plan to help David fight Goliath. Today ACID represents thousands of designers. We're here to help the good guys defeat the bad and also promote design originality as a real route to growth for the creator, not design thieves! There have been thousands of successful settlements on behalf of members.

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