What are some IP-related mistakes easily avoided by startups?

In addition to the answers I've seen here, I'd add that few start-ups consider how they might protect their intellectual assets using appropriate internal business structuring techniques. Start-ups are very vulnerable during the early stages of their trading life - IP assets can get snaffled as a result of lawsuits, insolvency and other nasties. One of the key ways of reducing this risk is to prevent the start-up company or trading entity from owning the key IP assets in the first place. The start-up can have access to these assets to conduct its business, but it won't have ownership of them, and in fact, the access can be severed if the start-up's solvency is threatened.

This outcome is achieved through owning critical IP in a non-trading entity and licensing it from that entity to the start-up so that it can trade. There is certainly some magic to the way that the enabling licence is put together, but it is worth doing.

One common mistake most startups make is rolling out products and services prior to conducting a freedom to operate study. Hiring a patent professional to conduct a clearance search BEFORE development of new products and services is complete can help startups understand if they will infringe on existing patent rights immediately out of the gate. In many cases, the existing patented technology can be designed around if it is known ahead of time.

Along the same lines, if a lawsuit is brought against the startup for patent infringement, hire a patent professional to conduct a validity search on the patent(s) involved. Inter Partes Review (IPR) may be an alternative to paying licensing fees or ending up in a costly legal battle.

I have what I call at least 5 myths about what people commonly claim to know about intellectual property law, which are as follows:
• A mark needs to be registered to be protectible;
Maybe in many countries in this world but NOT in the United States. A business accrues rights in a mark through its exclusive, continuous, open and notorious “use,” meaning by placing the mark on the company’s goods when sold in U.S. Commerce or by showing the mark when advertising the offered services and rendering those services. Those trademark rights accrue whether or not the mark is registered. A trademark registration merely reinforces those rights by announcing as a public record that the business owns the rights to the particular mark on the particular goods/services and since that announcement is deemed to be visible to all of the United States when registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the trademark rights are extended to be nationwide (as opposed to the actual commercial area where the mark is used). Likewise, merely using a mark that is too similar to an existing mark for similar or related goods/services can create infringement liability whether or not the earlier mark is registered if the marks overlap in the same relevant market and cause customers to be confused about which marks identify which business.

• A mark is available because the company name that is the mark was registered with the SOS;
The Secretary of State generally registers the name of a business in that state as long as that exact same name in the exact same spelling is not already registered. The SOS does not check the USPTO database of registered or pending marks, or any other database, to determine if another business is using that name as a mark. Moreover, the registration of a business with the SOS office is the creation and naming of a business entity, analogous to a person and their given name, and is not necessarily the name of a particular product or service, which is what a trademark or service mark is. Consequently, businesses (and their general lawyers without knowledge of trademark law) often make a serious mistake relying on the availability of a company name or mark merely because the SOS was willing to register the business in that name.

• I want to register GENERIC, INC. so my customers know immediately what my product or service is.
That strategy might spare some additional advertising expenditure because the company will not need to advertise and teach consumers how to recognize its goods/services in the marketplace. However, competing businesses will need to use that same terminology to describe their goods/services, which the law will permit, and that generic term for the goods/services will thereby lose its uniqueness for that company and will become ineffective as an identifier of the company’s particular goods/services. Consequently, the strongest, most valuable marks are marks that least describe or refer to the goods/services or any quality thereof and which instead are unique, arbitrary and make no sense in relation to the particular goods/services with which they are associated.

• There’s no likelihood of confusion between my mark and the other mark because my mark is in all capital letters and the other mark is in lower case letters.
Marks can be considered confusingly similar even if they are not exactly identical and/or their associated goods/services are not the same or closely related. First, marks are compared for similarity in sight, sound or meaning and therefore similarity on any of those qualities could be sufficient to consider marks too similar to coexist. Second, consumer confusion is measured on a sliding scale so the more similar the marks, the less similar the goods/services need to be and vice versa – the more similar the goods/services are, the less similar that the goods/services need to be to find a likelihood of confusion and infringement.

• Patents, copyrights and trademarks are distinctly different types of intellectual property;

One does not obtain a “patent” for a slogan, a trademark for an invention or a copyright for an idea. A patent is a right that is created and granted expressly by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) to an inventor “to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the particular invention” for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure of the invention to enable others to make and use the invention later. A trademark is “a word, phrase, symbol, or design, or a combination thereof,” that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods/services of one party from those of another. A trademark therefore grants exclusive rights to a word or design only when that word/design is used to refer to a specifically defined set of good/services or a particular market and not to the use of the word/design in any possible context. A copyright is a form of protection for the creator of an “original work of authorship” when that work is “fixed in a tangible medium of expression” such as literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and other intellectual works. A copyright therefore cannot protect anything that is not in a tangible medium, i.e. one’s thought or idea that is not reduced to a writing, or a similar genre or pattern of a story without the story also borrowing substantially the same specific content as the original story, i.e. its characters, literary setting or precise plotline.

I once got a call from a startup that their angel financing wouldn't go through until they had some IP in place which we did on a very accelerated basis, so that company didn't think about IP much in its early stages. Not knowing can blindside you; for patents the US has a 'grace period' but everywhere else in the world once you disclose your invention you can never get a patent on it. Software OS licenses like GPL are a more complex minefield; many OS licenses have a 'copyleft' provision that makes your own modifications also OS. Once your software legitimately falls under an OS license I'm not aware of any way to take it back - the only option I know of is to rewrite your program as a non-OS version. Fork and exec architecture can avoid that for the GPL but more generally programmers need to be cognizant of the specific OS terms that cover the code they're building from if they don't want the OS license on their own work. Usually if the GPL applies it does so for the entire program, not just pieces of code. IMHO, patent your key ideas regardless of whether your software that reflects that invention will be OS; you can still assert that patent against (most of) the non-OS community that might modify your software but avoid subjecting theirs to the OS license.
That help any?
Jerry

A few mistakes that I see every year relate the the easily insured areas of copyrights, trademarks, and trade names, etc... (patents and trade secrets are more complicated and more expensive to insure, so this post is not about those).

1. very early stage companies fail to purchase coverage. This is a time when the insurance coverage is super cheap, but it is also a time when your brand becomes known and things come out of the woodwork. We often see uncovered suits during this time, because a policy was not purchased. This seems obvious, but the coverage is really cheap and at times not purchased.
2. Most companies later get some specific IP protection through either their "Cyber insurance" or have it added to their technology errors and omissions insurance. The common mistakes we see after purchase are two-fold:
a. law suits come in and the company fails to notice the carriers -- maybe they don't know they have the coverage specifically, or legal does not let the insurance buyer (usually the CFO) know. (e.g. I had a customer settle a $2 million trademark claim without telling the insurer. It would have been 100% covered, had they properly noticed it.)
b. again relating to notice -- a suit arises and the company notifies their outside attorney before the insurance carrier. The outside attorney will typically quickly advance on the case without telling the company (the insured) that the carrier is supposed to provide counsel. Once the carrier is noticed and attempts to provide counsel, the client and carrier wind up in a fight. It costs the company money fairly consistently. It does not mean at times that the company cannot pick their own attorney, sometimes they can -- they just need to get approval first.

I see these all the time -- especially the last issue.

All the other posters have made great comments on trademarks, domain names, etc., which I agree with. Here are some other thoughts:
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A number of common mistakes occur in the intersection of IP, market analysis, and security. I have seen numerous startups launch into what they considered a good idea without doing a detailed enough market analysis to ensure that (a) what they propose is unique and useful, (b) what they are doing does not infringe on other companies' IP, and (c) they can create and maintain a defensible market position.
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Some investors, particularly in software / social media, no longer believe in patents as a form of protection because of the short time horizons for success of the business vs. the length of the patent prosecution process. Others, such as investors in hardware companies and healthcare, view IP as a key means of protecting a nascent market. This includes trademarks as well as patents; I am only addressing the latter here.
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Caveat on what follows: I am an inventor / serial entrepreneur, not a patent attorney. As such, what follows is a matter of opinion, and not advice.
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In the USA, I have seen many people falsely believe that they can protect their ideas with a hastily prepared provisional patent application written by the founders. While nice in theory, the reality is many provisional applications are of the form "Wouldn't it be nice if we could do X, Y, and Z?" rather than of the required form "We disclose a novel system and method for performing X, Y, and Z." Without the disclosure that shows novelty and non-obviousness, as well as enablement (providing enough disclosure that someone skilled in the art can reproduce the invention without undue experimentation), the provisional is worthless. In the end, this comes down to the question of can we write claims against the provisional specification, without having to go back and amend it to describe terms of art, enabling technology, novel steps, etc.? In many hastily prepared provisionals, the answer is no, so then the application must be completely reworked and the priority date of the provisional is lost. I have had to deal with this on several occasions.
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Much better, then, to work with a patent attorney from the very start. If you must file a provisional (usually because of impending product launch or other disclosure), you must make sure you can write claims against it. The most foolproof way to do this is by actually writing the claims you want, and using a concordance diagram to show that every clause of each claim is supported by exact language and figures in the specification. If you're doing that, you might as well file a non-provisional application rather than the provisional one. As someone who has filed over 30 patent applications, I can say I would NEVER file anything, even a provisional, without the aid of a good patent attorney.
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Finally, in order to keep a defensible market position, there are undoubtedly trade secrets (keying material for database encryption, customer lists, algorithms for matching vendors and clients, etc.). Often, this material is not adequately protected, and might be accidentally disclosed or stolen by hackers. In this day and age of cloud-hosted platforms and increased regulatory scrutiny, security of products must be built in from the very beginning, not added as an afterthought.