Intellectual Property Case Study : Trademark

Patent: A government authority or license conferring a right or title for a set period, especially the sole right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention.

A patent is a legal document giving inventors the property right to their own invention. A patent didn’t always mean the rights to an invention though. A patent used to mean a special privilege or favor. It also could be used to acquire more land or obtain rights to explore a new land. Presently the patent is used only for the rights to your invention. Virginia Alexandrea from The United States Patent and Trademark Office wrote the article “General Information Concerning Patents” where she described what Patent rights include.

While a trademark cannot be infringed upon at any time, if a trade secret is obtained through legal means it is no longer protected from use. With a patent, third parties are prevented from making, using or selling the invention thus protecting the funds used in the research and development (R & D)effort. This initial investment can be recovered and if the product is desirable, business success is realized for the property owner.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution provides the federal government with the power to issue patents and copyrights in order “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (U.S. Const. art. I, § 8). A patent provides the inventor with an exclusive right to “use, license or sell and invention,” (U.S. Const. art. I, § 8), as such the product, service, process or design becomes the personal property of the inventor(s).

An Introduction to the Law and Economics of Intellectual Property Author(s): Stanley M. Besen and Leo J. Raskind Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), pp. 3-27 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1942699 . Accessed: 24/11/2011 08:39

Legally issued by governments so patented inventions can inspire others and offer advantages because they are available to everyone but all proprietorship rights are reserved.

Copyrights are more limited in scope than patents. They protect the original works of authorship, not the ideas they contain. In the United States, original works include literary, drama, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. A computer program, for example, is considered a literary work and is protected by copyright. A copyright gives its owner the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the material or perform or display it publicly. However, copyright law does permit limited reproduction of copyrighted works without the owner 's permission for “fair use” such as criticism, teaching, and news reporting. In the United States, a published work must have a copyright notice, the name

A patent gives the authority to deny people the right to use, make or sell the invention. You can only patent an invention if it is completely new and not an adaption of an invention already present in the market, and if it can be made or used.

As a leading specialist chemical patent lawyer, my role is to write and prosecute your patent application and have it licensed by the federal government. A patent is a description of an intellectual idea and is used to protect different kinds of inventions as long as they are considered new and useful.

A patent is a twenty year exclusive monopoly on the right to make, use and sell a qualifying invention. This legal monopoly is considered a reward for the time and effort expended in creating the invention. In return, the invention must be described in detail to the Patent Office, which publishes the information, thus increasing the amount of technological knowledge available to the public. To obtain a U.S. patent, an inventor must apply to the Patent Office and demonstrate that the invention is new (as compared to prior technology), useful, and "nonobvious." An invention is nonobvious if it is more than a trivial, obvious next step in the advance of the technology. Software patents can be extremely powerful economic tools. They can protect features of a program that cannot be protected under copyright or trade secret law. For example, patents can be obtained for ideas, systems, methods, algorithms, and functions embodied in a software product: editing functions, user-interface features, compiling techniques, operating system techniques, program algorithms, menu arrangements, display presentations or arrangements, and program language translation methods. Since patent rights are exclusive, anyone making, using or selling the

Patents are used to protect new, and sometimes improved, products. Patents guard inventions. The owner of a patent has the exclusive right to make, sell, or otherwise use and profit from a tangible item for a certain period of time. A business or individual must apply for a patent through our government's United States Patent and Trademark Office in order to obtain one.

The U.S. constitution gave Congress the power to “ promote the devellopment of the useful arts” by granting exclusive rights to inventers for a limited period of time. The purpose of a patent was to assurre the rights of the creators in exchange for not keeping these inventions secret, thus overall knowledge base grows.

The law makes some changes to how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office operates. It changes, for example, the system of who receives the patent from first-to-invent to first-to-file. This puts the United States in line with how most countries around the world issue patents. A statement of Obama management policy summarizes the reasons (for doing something) for this change: "By adopting a first-inventor-to-file system, the bill simplifies the process of buying (and owning) copyright/patent rights. This provision provides greater feeling of being completely sure for clever creators, reduces legal costs that often heavy load small businesses and independent inventors, and makes it easier for clever creators to market their inventions in the worldwide

A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, product or process that provides a new way of doing something, or that offers a new technical solution to a problem. An invention in general must fulfill certain criteria in order to be protected by a patent. For example, the Patents Act, 1970 in S. 2(1) (j) defines invention as a new product or process involving an inventive step and capable of industrial application. In other words, an invention in order to be patentable must show an element of novelty, must show “an inventive step”, and must be of practical use. Particularly, the Patents Act, 1970 defines “inventive step” as a feature of an invention that involves technical advance as compared to the existing knowledge or having economic significance or both and that makes the invention not obvious to a person skilled in the art. In other words, patent rights are not available for new advances that are merely obvious extensions or modifications of prior designs. Besides, the requirement of difference over prior art, there is a requirement to establish the extent of common general knowledge that exists while

Intellectual property is critical to many companies in order to foster innovation and boosting their revenues. Many industries rely on the protection of patents, trademarks and copyrights as they are valuable assets for companies’ success. By protecting intellectual properties, it ensures that the original owner reaps full benefits from his/her ideas, features, products and creations.