Patents, trademarks and copyrights

If you’re creative, you might need all three sooner or later. Patents protect inventions, like a new kind of beer tap or laser. Trademarks protect brands, so people won’t be able to counterfeit your stuff. Copyrights protect intellectual property like songs or books.

A patent for an invention gives the inventor a property right. According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, patents are granted for new, useful and non-obvious inventions for a period of 20 years from the filing date of a patent application, and provide the right to exclude others from exploiting the invention during that period.

You must first ask yourself if your invention is even patentable.  Many patents are scuttled by “prior art,” the preexistence of your idea somewhere else.

Word of advice: if you’ve got something worth patenting, don’t play games. Hire a patent attorney.

In the words of the US Patent Office, “The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. For example, the substitution of one color for another, or changes in size, are ordinarily not patentable.”

It also needs to be useful, which is to say, it needs to work. You can’t patent a broken thermonuclear teleportation device, even if you could build a (broken) one.

Unlike a patent, a trademark protects the marketing of a product and not the product itself.

“A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others.” (A servicemark does the same thing for a service rather than a product.)

Trademarks last as long as you’re willing to use them.  The USPTO can reject a trademark application, however, if it finds that the mark is similar enough to another one and the goods and/or services are related.

Copyright protects the authors of "original works of authorship," including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, from people copying another’s work as their own. If artistic design factors into the value of your goods or services, you should become familiar with the rules to chase knockoff works.

If you created something with artistic value, you immediately get copyright to it. You don’t have to file anything. But you do have to be able to prove you made it. You retain copyright until 70 years after you die, but we wouldn’t count on the law holding out that long in its current form.