By: William M. Borchard
Although trademarks, copyrights, patents, and trade secrets all concern intangible property rights and overlap to some extent, they differ from each other significantly. If you know the attributes of each, you can take full advantage of them to weave a fabric of intellectual property protection. And the failure to get appropriate protection is an invitation to pirate. Competent legal advice often is advisable because all four areas of law are changing, especially as applied to new technology. It may help to distinguish them by remembering that:
> Trademarks protect source identifications (marks of trade);
> Copyrights protect original creative expressions;
> Patents protect new and useful inventions; and
> Trade Secrets protect valuable secret information.
This pamphlet summarizes the principal attributes of these various types of protection.
WHAT IS A TRADEMARK?
A trademark is a brand name, logo or package design, or a combination of them, used by a manufacturer or merchant to identify its goods or services and to distinguish them from others. Trademarks include brand names identifying goods (Dole for canned pineapple) and trade dress consisting of the graphics, color or shape of packaging or, after sufficient use, of goods (Coca-Cola Bottle for a soft drink); service marks identifying services (McDonald's for a restaurant service); certification marks identifying goods or services meeting specified qualifications (Woolmark for apparel made of 100% wool); and collective marks identifying goods, services or members of a collective organization (The International Game Fish Association for a game fishing organization). The same legal principles generally apply to all of these terms, often simply called "marks."
How to obtain trademark rights.
You need not register a trademark to have protectible exclusive rights in it and reserving a corporate name in one or more states is irrelevant to trademark rights. Simply by using a mark on or in connection with goods, or by displaying the mark in the sale or advertising of services, you can automatically acquire trademark rights in the geographic areas of use and natural expansion.
You can stake out nationwide trademark rights by applying to register the mark in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (One reason why people confuse trademarks with patents seems to be that both are handled by the same office, but the trademark and patent operations are completely separate.)
Read more >> http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/804904/Trademark/A+Trademark+Is+Not+A+Copyright+Or+A+Patent
