What is Patent ?
Patents Affect How Science is Carried Out and How Basic Science is Translated Into Business
•Patents Protect Inventions
•A grant by the government allowing you to exclude others from “making, using, selling, offering to sell, or importing” your invention for a period of 20 years
•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, selling, or importing the invention
What is a copyright?
•A bundle of exclusive rights held by the author of an original work – protects works of authorship, such as writings, music, and works of art that have been tangibly expressed
•Bundle includes exclusive rights to:
– Reproduce
– Make derivatives
– Distribute
– Perform
– Display
•Scope: Ideas are not protected, their expression is
•A copyright gives the owner of a creative work the right to KEEP OTHERS from unauthorized use of the work
•Gives the owner the EXCLUSIVE RIGHT to reproduce the copyrighted work, to distribute copies of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or display the copyrighted work publicly
What is a trademark?
•A trademark Protects words, names, symbols (logos), sounds, or colors that distinguish goods and services (for example, shape of Coca Cola bottle, name Coca Cola, roar of MGM lion, Apple logo, Microsoft name)
•A service mark is the same as a trademark – except that trademarks promote products and service marks promote services (e.g., FedEx, MTV, McDonald’s, Yahoo, Google, Amazon.com).
•The term “trademark” is often used to refer to both trademarks and service marks
•Trademark law-decisions of state and federal courts + US statutes- is applied to resolve disputes when competing businesses adopt similar product names or logos (Lanham Act)
What is a trade secret?
•Information that companies keep secret to give them an advantage over their competitors
•Any information that has commercial value, that has been maintained in confidence by a business, and that is not known to competitors
•For example, formula for Coca Cola, gene sequence database, genome sequences, software, cell lines, unpatented inventions, etc
•Trade Secret Law-decisions of state and federal courts + US statutes-plus-criminal anti-theft statutes