Rich Goldstein (00:05):
Do you need, is it a patent, a trademark or copyright? So you had this great idea. And the next thing that popped into your mind was, okay, what do I do with this idea? Who do I talk to about it? I don’t know who I can trust. Can I talk to my friends about this? Can I talk to my family about this? Can I go to a company with my idea? No, you don’t want to go to a company with it first, but yeah, that’s probably what you thinking what now? And you may have started searching the internet, looking for information about ideas, inventions, and patents. And through all that research, you ended up here on this website because you realize that patenting, the idea might be an important step for you and well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. And in this series, we’ll figure it out together. Um, one thing that many of our clients have in common is that they never intended to become inventors. They just came up with an idea and they found themselves in the position where they needed to learn what they need to do in order to pursue that idea and probably even figure out whether they should be pursuing the idea at all. This series addresses the most common questions that you probably have about the patent process and what you can do.
Rich Goldstein (01:23):
Now, did you have an idea? You know, the next question is what’s the appropriate way to go about protecting your particular idea. Um, under the law, there are different ways of protecting different types of ideas. You probably heard of some of them, things like patents, trademarks, and copyrights, and all of these fit within an area of the law known as intellectual property law. That’s the field of the law that deals with the protection of ideas, the ownership of ideas. So what we need to figure out is what’s the right way for you to own the idea that you’ve come up with. What’s the, what’s the right subject matter, uh, that matches with your idea and what matches with the type of protection
Rich Goldstein (02:09):
So the first form of protection we should talk about is copyright law. And we’ll talk about it quickly because copyright probably doesn’t apply to your situation, but you should understand why, uh, you probably heard things. I mean, you probably heard people say things like, Hey, that’s a great idea. You should copyright it. So we’ll explain why that probably doesn’t apply to your situation. So, first of all, copyright doesn’t protect ideas at all. Copyright protects artistic expression, copyright protects things like books, movies, plays, poetry and songs. So the proper subject matter of a copyright is things like books, movies, plays, poetry, songs, et cetera. But even for those things, it doesn’t protect the underlying idea. So if you’ve got an idea for a book, for example, the idea itself is not protected with a copyright, but the words you use to write the book might be protected. So even with the right subject matter a book, a copyright doesn’t protect the underlying idea. Just the way that you wrote the book, the words that you use.
Rich Goldstein (03:21):
Now, the second form of protection we’re going to talk about is trademark trademark law helps consumers to not be confused about where their product is coming from. So when you go to a store to buy a can of Coca-Cola, you see a can that’s labeled Coca Cola, and you can count on the fact that it’s the real thing as they put it because trademark law protects your expectation as a consumer that a product labeled Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola and, um, trademark law in general can protect anything that a company might use to identify their product or service in the marketplace. It could be the name Coca-Cola, it could be the writing style on the can. It could be the red and white color scheme on the can or that wavy line, or even the slogan. The real thing. These are all trademarks of Coca-Cola because they’re all things that if they were put on a competitors’ product, a consumer might be confused.
Rich Goldstein (04:19):
They might be confused into thinking that the competitor’s product was Coca Cola or was from the Coca-Cola company or somehow affiliated with them. So the key thing for you to understand right now about trademark law is that it might apply to you. If the thing that’s most important about what you have is the name of it, the name of, uh, of the product that you’ve come up with the slogan, um, or other aspects that are distinct from the product idea itself, or it may be something that you, you need to consider later on. If your focus is on a product idea itself. Uh, and then when you’re about to launch the product, you come back to look at the potential for trademarking those branding aspects. But what you should know for now is that if what you have in mind is the idea for a product, a service or something like a smartphone app that then you believe that it’s distinct from other things that already exist in the way that Patent law is probably the area of law that pertains to protecting your idea, patents, protect new and useful inventions that fit certain specific criteria that the patent office looks for when they’re deciding to grant the patent. So in part two of this series, we’re going to discuss the two most important criteria for determining whether you can get a patent on what you do.
