Copyrights Trademarks and Patents - Understanding Intellectual Property
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You are a business owner with a web presence. During a routine Google search
for your page ranking, you discover something disturbing. There is another
company out there with a name very similar to yours and almost identical content
on their website. What do you do? Is your company name and website content
automatically protected by copyright law? Should you have registered your
company name as a trademark? Can you demand that they change their name and
dismantle their website immediately?
Intellectual Property can be a confusing topic, and one that all business
owners should know about. Sadly however, many entrepreneurs simply don't.
Intellectual property is in very simple terms an idea that legally belongs to
somebody, be they a company or an individual. Only the owner of that idea, or
somebody the owner has a legal agreement with can use the idea. Generally, the
owner of the idea is usually its creator unless someone paid them to create the
idea, in which case the idea's owner is the person who paid for the idea. There
are different kinds of intellectual property, but for the purpose of this
article, we will focus on copyright, patent and trademark.
Patent – A patent protects the creators of new inventions. An invention can
include anything from a new product or business method to a recipe. If you
decide to patent your invention, there a few things you should know. First, you
will need to apply for a patent in every country where you would like your
invention to be protected. Secondly, getting a patent is going to cost you a
pretty penny. You will have to pay thousands of dollars to patent your idea and
it will take a minimum of 2 years (probably more) before you are granted a
patent. Also, your precious invention will no longer remain a secret since your
patent application will be made public once your application is submitted. If
all of this wasn't enough bad news, patent protection generally only lasts for
twenty years from the date of your application. Phew! On the up side, once your
patent is accepted, you can sue anyone who tries to manufacture or sell your
invention.
It's worth mentioning here that another method to keep your invention
protected is to keep the method of manufacturing it a ‘trade secret'. If you
choose this process, of course, in order to manufacture your product, you will
have to tell somebody. You would have to have anyone who would learn your secret
sign a confidentiality agreement. Consult a lawyer if you plan to use this
method.
Trademark – Trademarks are the marks used to distinguish one company's
products or services from another's. They can include a product name, a slogan,
and any other mark that is deemed to be unique to a company such as a logo or
unique packaging. As a rule, you can't trademark descriptive words, geographical
names or a person's name. You also cannot register a business' name. You can
however, register part of a name used to identify a product or service. For
example "Kellogg's Company" is the owner of the "Kellogg's" trademark and the
"Rice Krispies" trademark. You cannot register a trademark similar to one that
is already in use by another company. Beware; a trademark does not have to be
registered in order to prevent others from using it. If a company is using an
unregistered trademark in your geographical area, they can still prevent you
from using it. You could perform a search in a trademark database and find later
that you are using another company's unregistered trademark. If you find another
company in a completely different industry using your unregistered trademark,
you probably won't be able to do anything about it if they are not your
competitors or if they are not in your geographical vicinity. Protection of a
registered trademark however, is much stronger than an unregistered one, and
once you have a registered trademark, you can prevent competitors from using it,
or confusingly similar ones anywhere in the country in which your trademark is
registered.
Copyright – Any written text, artistic work, or computer program is
automatically protected by copyright. Anything you or I write, be it published,
online text or unpublished, handwritten text, is copyrighted. Also anything we
draw, paint, photograph, film, or compose is also protected by copyright.
Copyright can be registered, but it doesn't have to be in order for it to be
illegal for individuals to copy someone else's work. Copyright also lasts for an
extremely long time. Usually it lasts the duration of the author's life plus
fifty years at which point it becomes a part of the public domain and can be
used by anyone.
Factual information cannot be copyrighted. For example, this article is based
on fact. Although you cannot copy my article and claim to have authored it
yourself, you can take the facts included in the article and use them in your
own written material. If you would like to use a very small portion of someone
else's written work, this is usually acceptable as long as you credit the
author.
Finally, what do you do if someone uses your work without your permission?
Your first step should be to contact the individual. You can usually either go
to the contact page on the offender's web site or go to www.whois.com and enter
the offender's domain to find contact information. If your initial communication
doesn't get results, you should then send a ‘cease and desist order'. For sample
orders, just perform a search on ‘cease and desist orders'. Finally if still no
action is taken by the offending party, contact their web host and advise them
of the situation and finally, contact search engines and make them aware of the
situation. These actions should render the offender's website useless or in the
very least give them enough trouble to convince them to remove the copied
material.
For more information on intellectual property in Canada, visit the Canadian
Intellectual Property Office at www.cipo.ca, for the U.S., visit the United
States Patent and Trademark Office at www.uspto.gov and for Europe please visit
the European Patent Office at www.european-patent-office.org.
About the Author
Kelly Sims is a Virtual Assistant and Owner of Virtually There VA Services.
To find out more about virtual assistance and how using a Virtual Assistant can
simplify your life and increase your profitability, visit her website at =>
http://www.virtuallythereva.com . While you’re there, don’t forget to sign
up for her free monthly newsletter providing useful information that enhances
and simplifies the lives of busy entrepreneurs.
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Article Published/Sorted/Amended on Scopulus 2007-11-25 20:59:36 in Business Articles
