Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks

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 discuss patents later.

Let’s consider the following story: a poor man finds a large amount of cash on his way home from work. He decides to keep the money to improve his financial situation. But he cannot sleep at night because he is haunted by strange voices that tell him to find the owner and return the money.

This idea cannot be protected. Anybody can write a short story based on the concept. What is protected is how the author expresses the idea in the form of texts, illustrations, drawings, photographs, etc. Also see: What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of an AI-Generated Website?

Once an expression is copyrighted, others can still use it for fair use.

You can tape a few 15-second video clips from a copyrighted TV program and post them in your video blogs, providing commentary on the program or broadcaster, etc. This will be considered fair use, and you will not infringe on 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 an expired copyright, you can post it on your website.

In the USA, the Copyright Act of 1976 governs all copyrights.

The Copyright Act does not protect any ideas, procedures, processes, systems, methods of operation, concepts, principles, or discoveries, regardless of how they are expressed. It is the expression that the Copyright Act protects. You cannot copyright titles, names, slogans, and short phrases, even if they contain new ideas.

As mentioned earlier, the lifespan of a copyrighted material is typically the author’s life, plus 70 years in most cases.

There are a few exceptions to this rule, including copyrighted materials that were not renewed before 1964, materials published before 1978 without a copyright notice, and materials published by the U.S. 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.

You can register your copyrighted materials with the US Copyright Office. All expressions of ideas are copyrighted regardless of whether they are 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 Copyright Office, you can only recover actual damages.

A patent holder has the right to prevent others from using, selling, or 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 lifespan 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 composition of matter or improvement to the same. Three things 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 something useful with the invention.

If it is just a novel without any practical use, it cannot be patented. A patentable invention should not be evident to a person with ordinary skills in the same technology space related to the invention.

A design patent covers the appearance or aesthetic of an article and has a lifespan of 14 years after it is issued. A plant patent, as the name implies, protects a distinct plant produced asexually. It has a life span of 20 years from the filing date.

A trademark is a word, symbol, design, or a combination of one or more of these items.

A trademark is used to identify the source of goods or services of one company and differentiate its goods and services from those of others. A trademark should not be confusingly similar to other existing names or symbols.

A trademark is registered with the USPTO or 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.

You must actively use a trademark for your business to maintain it. Registering a trademark without actively using it will result in diminished rights over time.

Never allow a trademark to become a generic word. For example, Bayer’s trademark “Aspirin” has become a generic word to represent acetylsalicylic acid.

Others can use it without infringing on any rights. 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.

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About The Author
Post excerpt from Dr. Deepak Dutta, the creator of www.semanticbay.com