Protecting Your Ideas

Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are collectively known as intellectual property, and generally refer to the rights associated with intangible knowledge or concepts. Intellectual property may be a concern if your business is developing (or has developed) a product, process, or concept that you are going to market.

Intellectual property may also be a concern if your business is using a process that was created by someone else, whether you know about it or not. The laws surrounding intellectual property are quite complicated. If you believe that your business has any intellectual property concerns, you should ask your attorney what to do. If some legal work needs to be done, your attorney will probably recommend you to another attorney who specializes in this area.

Here's a short description of some of the issues pertaining to patents, trademarks, and copyrights, which should help you get a better feel for what they are:

Patent. A patent is a grant of a right to the inventor by the government. The right embodied in a patent allows the inventor of the right (or the patent holder, if the patent has been assigned) to exclude others from making or using the invention for a period of time, usually twenty years. Patent searches can be conducted to find out if someone else already has a patent on a product, process, or concept that you're going to build or market.

Trademark. A trademark is the right to use a specific name, word, phrase, symbol, logo, design, sound, color, or a combination of any of these elements — to identify your products and to distinguish them from the products of others. The name must be sufficiently unique to identify your products; you can't obtain trademark rights to a generic term like "computers" or "coffee."

A service mark is similar to a trademark but refers to the right to use a name to identify the source of services, and to distinguish that source from other service providers in the marketplace. If you have a name or some other item that you plan on using as a symbol of your business, it's a good idea to conduct a trademark screen to make certain that your name isn't already in use.

Copyright. A copyright is the right to reproduce a certain work if the work is in fixed form. A copyright is secured automatically when the work is created and is identified by the symbol ©, however, in order to be able to enforce a copyright, the work should be registered with the federal government. A copyright term is for the life of the creator plus 70 years. Copyright infringement can be avoided by showing that the work in question was created independently of the copyrighted work.