Do Copyrights, Patents and Trademarks Protect the Same Things?
No. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks all differ.
A copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship,” both published and unpublished. It protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the expression. A federally registered copyright grants the copyright owner 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 Library of Congress issues Federal copyright registrations.
A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, 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. U.S. patent grants are effective only within the U.S., U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions.
The right conferred by the patent grant is “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.
A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that 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.
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