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This Chapter illustrates how to identify your product market and competitive threats, then use IP rights to protect your markets and business models. Lawyers often speak of IP “protection.” This is an apt term, because to a business person IP rights are all about helping to build up and protect revenue streams. The entire purpose of an IP right is to restrict competition. (In exchange for the development of something new and valuable.) In common language people sometimes refer to IP rights as “monopolies,” but in reality a single right only very rarely confers complete dominance in an economic market. The truth is more modest, but still valuable: an IP right protects in some degree against complete, free competition. The key to IP strategy is to figure out how to use the limited protections granted under an IP right to restrict competition in a way that maximizes business goals. To do that, you first have to understand the relationship between what IP rights cover and what parts of a business or product are crucial to driving revenue.