Intellectual Property Law

DOES YOUR NON-COMPETE HAVE ANY MUSCLE?

Featured Article By Charles Moster, Esq.
MosterWynne Law Firm

If you are an employer starting a business and you are wondering how to protect the customer list, inventions, and other intellectual property you are working so hard to develop, you are likely concerned about how the use of non-compete agreements can help or hurt you. Your concerns are well founded particularly in light of recent Texas court cases.
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IS YOUR BUSINESS FLYING WITHOUT “IP RADAR”?

Featured Article By Charles Moster, Esq.
MosterWynne Law Firm

As a fellow entrepreneur, it is disheartening to see how many emerging businesses operate without protecting even their most critical forms of intellectual property. In fact, many business owners are not even sure what “intellectual property” (IP) means.

Simply put, it is the fruits of your imagination and can include everything from the name of your business or product/service, to the content of your website; photographs, designs and works of art ...
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What is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.

Intellectual property is divided into two categories:

• Industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and
• Copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs.

What Is a Patent?

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the Patent and Trademark Office. The term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. US patent grants are effective only within the US, US territories, and US possessions.

The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself, “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or “importing” the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention.

What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?

A trademark is a word, name, symbol or device which is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms "trademark" and "mark" are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be registered with the Patent and Trademark Office. The registration procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks is described in a separate pamphlet entitled "Basic Facts about Trademarks".

What Is a Copyright?

Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.

The copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the writing. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.

Additional Intellectual Property Law Information

• Copyright and Intellectual Property Law Resources
• Copyright Basics
     - What Is Copyright?
     - Who Can Claim
     - Copyright
     - Copyright and National Origin of the Work
     - What Works Are Protected?
     - What Is Not Protected by Copyright?
• World of Intellectual Property Organization