Names are very popular trademarks – trademarking a business name, for example, is commonplace. A business name trademark, however, must be unique and non-obvious. You cannot trademark a name like “Speedy Dry Cleaners” because thousands of dry cleaners already have the same name. Being descriptive of what a good dry cleaner is, it is too generic to be trademarked. Even something like “Cheetah Dry Cleaners” may be too descriptive by association to be eligible for a trademark.

Arbitrary names are often the best candidates for business name trademarking – “Apple” for a computer company, for example. Recall that a trademarked business name applies only to that product area a business operates in – thus someone might open an “Apple Dry Cleaners” business or trademark the name themselves.

Not all phrases need to be – or even should be – trademarked. Typically trademarks are used in places you really want to distinguish your business from another business, and have a phrase that is truly unique. “This is a great product” would not qualify for trademark protection. Also, trademarking a phrase for a limited advertisement campaign that isn’t essential to your brand identity may not be the best use of your resources. But if you plan to make the phrase an integral part of your business, a trademark will prevent competitors from co-opting that phrase or even trademarking your phrase themselves.

So make sure the phrase is unique and effective for your business plan, and determine whether you want your phrase to be trademarked with a stylized or standard character mark. A stylized mark will protect the combination of the words and graphic elements, like typography, while a standard character mark will protect the words in the phrase generally.

Trademark registration takes place through the USPTO (The United States Patent and Trademark Office). The trademark registration process is similar to the patent process and involves a trademark search to determine whether registered trademarks disqualify your trademark idea.

An attorney is not required to register a trademark, but there are many legal deadlines in a typical trademark timeline that an experienced trademark attorney will know how to navigate, and only a registered trademark attorney can guarantee you the most comprehensive trademark search on existing marks and a trademark search analysis that can tell you the likelihood of success in pursuing a trademark application.

Note that you can get limited trademark protection (™) simply by using your mark in connection with selling goods and services through your business, but this only applies to a limited geographical and commercial scope.

To register a trademark for broader trademark protection, you must first:

• Choose your mark and how it will be depicted. A trademark registration can be done in a stylized or standard character form. A stylized mark is a mark that contains style or design elements beyond the trademark itself, like colors, fonts and graphical elements. These elements will be protected as a whole, along with the text. A standard character mark is plain text, without formatting or design. This gives you broad trademark protection of your mark, but doesn’t protect any stylistic elements.
• Choose the nature of goods and/or services you are selling with your mark. A mark is always specific to a certain focus like this, unless multiple trademark applications are filed.
• Choose whether the mark is to be filed under the “intent to use” or “use in commerce” basis – basically, whether you intend to use the mark to sell the specific goods and/or services classifications you are filing under, or if you have already begun to use the mark to sell these goods and/or services.
• Following completion of these steps, a trademark can be filed at the USPTO website at http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/teas/index.jsp

A design is patented slightly differently than other patents as it is not identifying some new function or use of the patent, but rather a new design feature. Thus the application will rely more heavily on diagrams and drawings of the patent in question than other patents might. Unlike other patents, there is only a single claim of the invention – namely, that it has the novel design that the application as a whole claims it does. A specifications and description section of the patent might describe the patent design in more depth, but the pictures are ultimately the greatest proof in the case of design patents.

An invention is the most straightforward kind of patent in regards to establishing its patentability – a typical utility patent is often some kind of invention, after all, and very commonly it is a mechanical invention of the sort familiar to all of us – an engine, a lightbulb, a new kind of tool, etc. Thus an invention is clear cut in its requirements for patentability, so long as you meet the requirements of patent utility, novelty and non-obviousness.

You know it has to do with product and invention protection – but what are patents, exactly?

Patents are one type of intellectual property protection, along with copyrights and trademarks. Patents generally apply to concrete inventions – like tools, machinery, and Thomas Edison’s famous light bulb – or to processes, like a new business process or software. Possible examples of patents might include a functioning hovercraft, a more efficient device to water a garden, a new formula for shampoo, or a checklist system to improve doctor efficiency at a hospital. Successful patents for inventions and innovations like these ensure the inventor’s safety from patent infringement and costly patent lawsuits for up to 20 years from the date the patent application process begins.

Note that a patent does not cover a brand or a product itself – this would require trademark protection. Strict requirements govern the issuing of a patent, such as a light bulb, whereas a unique product name and brand image can be trademarked for a product regardless of its uniqueness – such as Edison Light Bulbs®.

While possible to file a patent yourself, there are risks involved. The patent process makes it possible for anyone to get a patent, but intellectual property attorneys are trained, registered patent experts with years of experience in patent research, patent application writing, working with patent examiners and appealing when the patent office rejects patent application claims, and protecting inventors from costly patent litigation.

It is unrealistic to think a do-it-yourself patent equals a cheap patent – if anything, trying to get a patent yourself could cost you a good deal of money when a competitor is able to sidestep loosely written patent claims and figure out another way to make the product that you are trying to get patent protection on. The patent process is also a time-consuming one, and missing a deadline or failing to submit patent application materials in a timely fashion could mean the rejection of your application.

To learn more about filing a patent yourself, visit the USPTO for resources for do-it-yourself patents.

An invention doesn’t have to be completely new to be patentable. Innovations form the bulk of existing patents – not entirely new inventions, but improvements on existing patents and patented inventions.

But before you go reinvent the wheel, it’s important to know that not just anything can be patented – there are specific patent requirements about whether the invention is sufficiently different from existing patents to deserve its own patent number and patent classification. The three major requirements for a patent are utility, novelty, and non-obviousness.

Utility says that an invention must have a utility or general function and must perform that function. An idea for a time travel machine, thus, would fail on this criterion, as it can’t actually perform its function at this point in time.

Novelty requires that an invention not be known, used or patented by others before the applicant invented it, nor sold or used publically in any country for more than a year prior to the patent application date. You can, therefore, neither reinvent the wheel nor patent it. So if you have been selling your new invention for a few months, it is in your best interest to find a patent attorney and patent it before your year runs out.

Non-obviousness requires that an invention be different enough from the prior art – or existing patents and inventions in use – that a person of ordinary skill in that field could not come up with the invention themselves. For example, if someone tried to take a patent for a specific kind of shovel and make it out of steel instead of aluminum, it would fail on non-obviousness.

So you have an idea for an invention – but is it patentable? A patentability search of existing filed patents will help you determine this.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent search engine is the first stop for determining the patentability of an invention. Performing a patent search draws on the patent claims, the description of the invention, and the diagrams of existing patents to determine whether the inventor’s new patent is unique compared to the existing patents, or the ‘prior art’. Experience with patents and the USPTO helps a patent searcher to identify those unique qualities qualify the invention for patent filing.

While possible to look up patents on your own, experienced patent search firms know how to find patents that might disqualify your patent without you realizing it. An informed patent analysis will also help you realize that many existing inventions do not, actually, disqualify your idea. Trying to patent it yourself risks losing a possibly valuable patent or pursuing a costly application without having a patentable product.

Interested in getting a search on a patent idea? Call (908) 879-0091 for a free 15-minute patent consultation.

A copyright, denoted by a © symbol, applies to original creative works such as music, movies, photographs, poems and so on, regardless of whether they are published or unpublished. Copyright protection begins from the moment of creation, and doesn’t require filing with the Copyright Office. However, filing a copyright with the Copyright Office does allow you to bring a lawsuit in the case of copyright infringement, and provides you evidence in a court of law that you do, in fact, possess rights to your copyrighted work.

A trademark doesn’t apply to authored works of creativity, but only to words, phrases, designs and symbols used for commercial purposes. Creative designs, names or slogans for marketing purposes are trademarked, not copyrighted. The trademark process is more competitive and trademarking is not automatic, and there are more restrictions on what can qualify for a trademark than for a copyright. To register a trademark, a creator or business must apply to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) demonstrating the uniqueness of their work – something an experienced trademark attorney can assist with.