Introduction To Copyrights, Patents, And Trademarks
January 02, 2007
Contributing Writer: Deepak Dutta
What is a copyright? Can
everything be copyrighted? A copyright is the expression of an idea.
The idea itself is not copyrighted. Ideas can be patented and I will
talk about patents later.
Let's consider the example of a
story: a poor man who found lots of cash on his way back to his home
from his work. He decided to keep the cash to improve his financial
situation. But he could not sleep at night because he was haunted by
strange voices that told him to find the owner and return the cash.
This idea cannot be protected. Anybody can write a short story based
on the idea. What is protected is how the author expresses the idea
in the form of texts, illustrations, drawings, photographs, etc.
Once an expression is copyrighted, others can still use it
for fair use. You can tape a few 15 seconds video clips from a
copyrighted TV programs and post it in your video blogs about a
commentary on the program or broadcaster, etc. This will be
considered a fair use and you will not infringe the copyright.
After a copyrighted material expires, it falls into the
public domain. The life of a copyrighted material is the life of the
author, plus 70 years. The public domain copyrighted materials can be
reproduced without any infringement. For example, if you have an old
picture with expired copyright, you can post the picture in your
website.
In the USA, the Copyright Act of 1976 governs all
copyrights. The Copyright Act does not protect any ideas, procedures,
process, systems, and methods of operations, concepts, principle or
discovery regardless of how it is expressed. It is the expression
that is protected by the Copyright Act. You cannot copyright titles,
names, slogans, and short phrases even if those have new ideas.
As
mentioned earlier, the life span of a copyrighted material is the
author's life, plus 70 years in most cases. There are a few
exceptions to this rule and they are: un-renewed copyrighted
materials published pre-1964, materials published before 1978 without
a copyrighted notice, and materials published by the US Government.
All copyrighted materials should be fixed in a tangible
medium (papers, CDs, DVDs, etc.). If it is not fixed in a tangible
medium, it is not copyrighted. For example, your speech to the
graduating class that was never recorded, taped, or published is not
protected under the US Copyright Act. Your can register your
copyrighted materials with the US Copyright Office. All expressions
of ideas are copyrighted regardless it is registered with the
Copyright Office or not. If you register the expression with the
Copyright Office, you can receive statutory damages and attorney's
fees if an infringement occurs. If the material is not registered
with the Copyrighted Office, you can only recover actual damages.
A
patent holder of an invention has the right to exclude others from
using, selling, and making the invention. The United States Patent
Office (USPTO) awards patents. There are three kinds of patents:
utility, design, and plant patents.
The most frequently used
patents are utility patents. They have a life span of 20 years from
the effective filing date if the filing date is after June 8, 1995. A
utility patent also requires periodic maintenance fees. A utility
patent must be a novel, useful, and non-obvious process, machine,
manufacture, or compositions of matter or improvement to the same.
There are three things that define a utility patent. First, it must
be novel. Nobody should have invented, published, used, or
manufactured the invention before. Second, one should be able to do
some thing useful with the invention. If it is just novel without any
usefulness, it cannot be patented. A patentable invention should not
be obvious to the person with ordinary skills in the same technology
space related to the invention.
A design patent is the
appearance or aesthetic of an article and it has a life span of 14
years after the patent is issued. A plant patent, as the name
applies, protects a distinct plant produced asexually. It has life
span of 20 years from the filing date.
A trademark is word,
symbol, design, or a combination of one or more of these items. It is
used to identify the source of goods or services of one company and
differentiate a company's goods and services from others. A trademark
should not be confusingly similar to other existing names or symbols.
A trademark is registered with the USPTO. It can also be
registered through the state's Secretary of State's office. If the
trademark is not registered, the rights to the trademark may be
geographically limited. You cannot use the symbol ® to represent
a mark if it is not registered.
If you want to maintain a
trademark for your business, you must actively use it. Just
registering a trademark without using it actively will result in
diminished rights over time. Never allow a trademark to become a
generic word. For example, the trademark "Aspirin" by Bayer
has become a generic word to represent acetylsalicylic acid. Others
can use it without causing any infringement. When you see a trademark
used by authors as a noun or a verb, it may become a generic word.
Trademark owners vigorously pursue authors from using the trademark
as a noun or a verb. A trademark should always be used as an
adjective. For example, Google is preventing others from using the
word Google as a verb.
==========================
About
the Author: Dr. Deepak Dutta is the creator of
http://www.semanticbay.com
- a social network site for article authors. His other website
http://www.classifiedsforfree.com
- is one of the oldest online classifieds site.
==========================
Source:
www.isnare.com
==========================
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