What's the Difference Between a Copyright and a Trademark?
If you are a creative entrepreneur, then you’ve likely run up against whether you need to protect your work through a trademark or copyright, or both. To distinguish between the two can be confusing. Both are considered “intellectual property” or “IP,” but protect different types of IP. Intellectual property is in essence your ideas put into a tangible form. Filing a copyright and/or trademark gives you legal protection over your intellectual property. Patents are another form of IP, but used by inventors and scientists, more so than creative entrepreneurs. Let’s look at the difference between copyright and trademark:
Copyright
A copyright protects literary and artistic works, such as books, videos, music, software, poetry, website copy, art, architecture, and really anything original you create in a tangible form. A copyright is automatically formed upon creating the work. Filing the copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office gives more definite legal protection of that work and highly recommended. It is a relatively easy process with an approximate $65 fee. A copyright lasts for the author’s life, plus 70 years. For more information on why you should file a trademark, read this article.
Trademark
A trademark relates entirely to a brand’s identity, including a company name, business logo, and brand slogan. Filing a trademark is more extensive than filing a copyright and, unlike a copyright, a trademark filing is not guaranteed and much more time-sensitive and expensive with a minimum $295 filing fee. For this reason, it is recommended that you use an attorney to correctly file a trademark. A trademark must also be renewed every ten years.
You can register a business name with your Secretary of State without filing a trademark as the two are mutually exclusive. However, in both cases, the name must be original within your same sector of business. The same is true with buying your business’ domain name URL. The law recognizes first-in-time with regards to which business used the name, slogan, or logo first. For this reason, a thorough search should be conducted to avoid your trademark filing being refused by the USPTO..
If you register your trademark with the USPTO, you'll use the registered trademark symbol ® to indicate that your property is legally trademarked. If your trademark is not registered through the USPTO, you can use the ™ symbol to signify common law rights in a trademark.
You can see how both forms of intellectual property are vital to a creative business. A trademark, which applies to all types of businesses, protects the company brand, while a copyright protects a creative work.
Copyright filing: www.copyright.gov
Trademark filing: www.uspto.gov