You are a business owner with a web presence. During a
routine Google search for your page ranking, you discover
something disturbing. There is another company out there
with a name very similar to yours and almost identical
content on their website. What do you do? Is your company
name and website content automatically protected by
copyright law? Should you have registered your company
name as a trademark? Can you demand that they change their
name and dismantle their website immediately?
Intellectual Property can be a confusing topic, and one
that all business owners should know about. Sadly however,
many entrepreneurs simply don't. Intellectual property is
in very simple terms an idea that legally belongs to
somebody, be they a company or an individual. Only the
owner of that idea, or somebody the owner has a legal
agreement with can use the idea. Generally, the owner of
the idea is usually its creator unless someone paid them to
create the idea, in which case the idea's owner is the
person who paid for the idea. There are different kinds of
intellectual property, but for the purpose of this article,
we will focus on copyright, patent and trademark.
Patent – A patent protects the creators of new inventions.
An invention can include anything from a new product or
business method to a recipe. If you decide to patent your
invention, there a few things you should know. First, you
will need to apply for a patent in every country where you
would like your invention to be protected. Secondly,
getting a patent is going to cost you a pretty penny. You
will have to pay thousands of dollars to patent your idea
and it will take a minimum of 2 years (probably more)
before you are granted a patent. Also, your precious
invention will no longer remain a secret since your patent
application will be made public once your application is
submitted. If all of this wasn't enough bad news, patent
protection generally only lasts for twenty years from the
date of your application. Phew! On the up side, once your
patent is accepted, you can sue anyone who tries to
manufacture or sell your invention.
It's worth mentioning here that another method to keep your
invention protected is to keep the method of manufacturing
it a 'trade secret'. If you choose this process, of
course, in order to manufacture your product, you will have
to tell somebody. You would have to have anyone who would
learn your secret sign a confidentiality agreement.
Consult a lawyer if you plan to use this method.
Trademark – Trademarks are the marks used to distinguish
one company's products or services from another's. They
can include a product name, a slogan, and any other mark
that is deemed to be unique to a company such as a logo or
unique packaging. As a rule, you can't trademark
descriptive words, geographical names or a person's name.
You also cannot register a business' name. You can
however, register part of a name used to identify a product
or service. For example "Kellogg's Company" is the owner
of the "Kellogg's" trademark and the "Rice Krispies"
trademark. You cannot register a trademark similar to one
that is already in use by another company. Beware; a
trademark does not have to be registered in order to
prevent others from using it. If a company is using an
unregistered trademark in your geographical area, they can
still prevent you from using it. You could perform a
search in a trademark database and find later that you are
using another company's unregistered trademark. If you find
another company in a completely different industry using
your unregistered trademark, you probably won't be able to
do anything about it if they are not your competitors or if
they are not in your geographical vicinity. Protection of
a registered trademark however, is much stronger than an
unregistered one, and once you have a registered trademark,
you can prevent competitors from using it, or confusingly
similar ones anywhere in the country in which your
trademark is registered.
Copyright – Any written text, artistic work, or computer
program is automatically protected by copyright. Anything
you or I write, be it published, online text or
unpublished, handwritten text, is copyrighted. Also
anything we draw, paint, photograph, film, or compose is
also protected by copyright. Copyright can be registered,
but it doesn't have to be in order for it to be illegal for
individuals to copy someone else's work. Copyright also
lasts for an extremely long time. Usually it lasts the
duration of the author's life plus fifty years at which
point it becomes a part of the public domain and can be
used by anyone.
Factual information cannot be copyrighted. For example,
this article is based on fact. Although you cannot copy my
article and claim to have authored it yourself, you can
take the facts included in the article and use them in your
own written material. If you would like to use a very
small portion of someone else's written work, this is
usually acceptable as long as you credit the author.
Finally, what do you do if someone uses your work without
your permission? Your first step should be to contact the
individual. You can usually either go to the contact page
on the offender's web site or go to www.whois.com and enter
the offender's domain to find contact information. If your
initial communication doesn't get results, you should then
send a 'cease and desist order'. For sample orders, just
perform a search on 'cease and desist orders'. Finally if
still no action is taken by the offending party, contact
their web host and advise them of the situation and
finally, contact search engines and make them aware of the
situation. These actions should render the offender's
website useless or in the very least give them enough
trouble to convince them to remove the copied material.
For more information on intellectual property in Canada,
visit the Canadian Intellectual Property Office at
www.cipo.ca, for the U.S., visit the United States Patent
and Trademark Office at www.uspto.gov and for Europe please
visit the European Patent Office at
www.european-patent-office.org.
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Kelly Sims is a Virtual Assistant and President of
Virtually There VA Services. Please visit her website to
sign up for her free monthly newsletter providing useful
information that enhances and simplifies the lives of busy
entrepreneurs. => http://www.virtuallythereva.com .
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