Trademarks and Copyrights

Starting a Business

Trademarks and Copyrights

 

Protecting Your Business with Trademarks and Copyrights A lot of entrepreneurs are sprouting like mushrooms these days. Whether this be a small, medium or large enterprise; people have been turning to building their own businesses to manage their own time, be their own bosses and to allow them to fully express their creativity and innovativeness.   While we are all eager to work for ourselves, create new products, or improve services; there are certain aspects in business that we have to think of – to protect it from being used by other entities and claimed as their own.   This is where trademarks and copyrights come into the picture.   Trademarks Briefly, a trademark is a mark indicating ownership of a certain product or a chain of products. There are many benefits to registering our marks to the appropriate Intellectual Property Office.   Firstly, our trademark will be our form of branding our products so that when consumers see the mark; they will immediately associate our company with these. They can be assured that the product or service for that matter, is of excellent quality because they can recognize right away that these are from us.   Secondly, a trademark will prevent others from stealing our products and passing them as their own. Although there are many counterfeit items these days, the exact design and specifications of our trademark will be hard to duplicate hence; a discriminating eye can immediately tell which one is fake and which is real.   In addition, the quality of the materials used will also be of inferior quality so if you match this with a copied trademark, people will know straightaway that this one’s a fake.   Before applying to register a trademark, we should first check if the trademark of your choice has already been registered by another entity. There are sites online that can help us check if our trademark is still available for registration.   Copyrights A copyright on the other hand, represents legal ownership of any written work in the form of music and lyrics, scripts, manuscripts, books and papers; plus other intellectual outputs, regardless of whether it has already been published or not.   This will prevent others from using the exact concept that we have written about down to the last detail. Copyrights for businesses include written descriptions of certain products or services. On the other hand, while these exact descriptions may have been already copyrighted, others can write their own description of our products based on their knowledge of these.   Copyrights may likewise be applied for at the appropriate Intellectual Property Office.

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