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What Are Patents, Trademarks, Servicemarks,
and Copyrights?
(Excerpted from General Information Concerning Patents
print brochure)
Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
Although there may be some similarities among these
kinds of intellectual property protection, they
are different and serve different purposes.
What Is a Patent?
A patent for an invention is the grant of a property
right to the inventor, issued by the Patent and
Trademark Office. The term of a new patent is 20
years from the date on which the application for
the patent was filed in the United States or, in
special cases, from the date an earlier related
application was filed, subject to the payment of
maintenance fees. US patent grants are effective
only within the US, US territories, and US possessions.
The right conferred by the patent grant is, in
the language of the statute and of the grant itself,
“the right to exclude others from making,
using, offering for sale, or selling” the
invention in the United States or “importing”
the invention into the United States. What is granted
is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell
or import, but the right to exclude others from
making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing
the invention.
What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?
A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device which
is used in trade with goods to indicate the source
of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods
of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark
except that it identifies and distinguishes the
source of a service rather than a product. The terms
"trademark" and "mark" are commonly
used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.
Trademark rights may be used to prevent others
from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to
prevent others from making the same goods or from
selling the same goods or services under a clearly
different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate
or foreign commerce may be registered with the Patent
and Trademark Office. The registration procedure
for trademarks and general information concerning
trademarks is described in a separate pamphlet entitled
"Basic Facts about Trademarks".
What Is a Copyright?
Copyright is a form of protection provided to the
authors of “original works of authorship”
including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic,
and certain other intellectual works, both published
and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally
gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right
to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative
works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the
copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work
publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.
The copyright protects the form of expression rather
than the subject matter of the writing. For example,
a description of a machine could be copyrighted,
but this would only prevent others from copying
the description; it would not prevent others from
writing a description of their own or from making
and using the machine.
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TRADEMARK
SEARCH
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TRADEMARK
MONITORING
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TRADEMARK
APPLICATION
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LEGAL
ADVICE REGARDING TRADEMARKS
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