Key to IP | Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks, and Trade Secrets
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What You’ll Learn on This Site

In just sixty minutes, you’ll learn the language of intellectual property and come out knowing more than 90% of the general public.

Clear visuals and easy-to-follow examples will allow you to quickly understand the most important elements of intellectual property.

The lessons you learn in these pages will enable you to recognize new possibilities and turn your ideas into value.

Why You Should Care

Sharing ideas in exchange for a reward is a relatively new concept. This is a graph of the standard of living for the past 2000 years.

Two very important takeaways:

  1. A person living in the 1700s was not much better off than a person living in the time of the Romans.
  2. Things have gotten dramatically better since then.

What changed after 1700+ years?

What turned 1700 years of languish into the past few hundred years of progress? Intellectual property. Or rather, the creation of nationwide intellectual property systems that reward inventors for sharing their great ideas. Instead of keeping their ideas a secret, people shared them, and this led to more great ideas.

Enjoy your life? Thank Intellectual Property.

This system of sharing ideas in exchange for a reward drives innovation and is directly responsible for your standard of living today. How much is your great idea worth?

Intellectual Property

There are four main types of Intellectual Property that you can use to protect your idea. These are Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights, and Trade Secrets.

 

Each type of intellectual property has its own use and set of advantages. You can think of them like tools. A screwdriver is great if you want to secure a screw, but not if you want to secure a bolt. You’d use a wrench for that.

 

Likewise, it’s important to pick the right type of intellectual property for the task.

Read More About Intellectual Property

Patents

Defined

Patents offer the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, importing, or offering an invention for sale over a fixed period of time.

 

Patents don’t actually give you the right to do something. They give you the right to keep others from doing that thing.

Read More About Patents

Examples

Eddie Van Halen’s Guitar Support

James Cameron’s Underwater Propulsion Device

George Lucas’s Boba Fett Action Figure

Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook

*all famous, inventors

Trademarks

Defined

A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used to indicate the source of goods or services and distinguish them from the goods or services of others.

 

Think of trademarks as adjectives. Just as you would use an adjective to describe a quality of an item, you can use a Trademark to describe the source of that item.

Read More About Trademarks

Examples of Trademarks

Aqua® (user interface)

Bonjour® (networking technology)

Chicago® (computer font)

Instruments® (developer software)

Keychain® (operating system feature)

Lightning® (connectors)

Logic® (application program)

Metal™ (software technology)

Spaces® (operating system feature)

*all trademarks of Apple Inc.

Copyrights

Defined

A copyright protects a work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression.

 

Copyrights do not protect ideas, but they can protect how those ideas are expressed.

Read More About Copyrights

Examples of Copyrights

Book: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone written by J. K. Rowling

Script: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by Steve Kloves

Movie: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone directed by Chris Columbus

Book: Harry Potter Page to Screen: The Complete Filmmaking Journey by Bob McCabe

*Harry Potter from book to script to movie to book

Trade Secrets

Defined

A trade secret is made up of secret, valuable, and protected information.

 

Trade secrets protect the information that gives you a competitive advantage.

Read More About Trade Secrets

Examples of Trade Secrets

Google’s search algorithm

The ingredients in WD-40

The eleven herbs and spices used by Colonel Sanders in KFC

The formula for Coca-Cola