How The Game Is Played

Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks, oh my!

Okay,

Time for an educational rant. How many things wrong can you find in this sentance?

"Bechtolsheim is expected to bring new ideas to Sun's lineup. He has applied for several patents with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office hoping to secure the copyright to words like "Streamhub," "Streamswitch," "Streamstar," "Streamstor," "Streamcast," and "Netblade." "

(source http://www.internetnews.com/fina-news/article.php/3311271)

This is about the most blatently IP ignorant statement I've ever seen, the reporter should be ashamed. Patents are not Copyrights, Copyrights are not trademarks. They are very different things.

Clearly what the writer should have said was:

"Bechtolsheim is expected to bring new ideas to Sun's lineup. He has applied for several trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office including "Streamhub," "Streamswitch," "Streamstar," "Streamstor," "Streamcast," and "Netblade." "

But unfortunately this writer, and their editor, apparently knew no more then the average man does about these important terms. So you can knwo more then the average man, I'm going to take a moment to explain them. Then you too can either laugh at or tear your hair out over the way they are abused in America today.

Lets start with Copyright. A copyright is a right to control the copying of something. Thats why its called a "copy right". Thats where the word comes from. Copyrights only cover significant works of personal expression fixed in a tangible medium.

"Significant" refers to size, not importance. Single words cannot be copyrightted because, by the definition in the law, they are not significant. Furthermore, the law states that any coined terminology is immediately public domain with regards to copyright. You cannot create an exclusive language or jargon protected by Copyright. Its really that simple in this case.

The "tangible medium" requriement means you have to be able to point to your work and say "there it is" for it to be protected. An impromptou performance, for instance, is not in itself Copyrightable. I can re-perform what I remember of your performance without infringing your rights. HOWEVER if I video-tape your performance then I just fixed it in a tangible meidum, at which point you own the right to copy what is on that tape and I cannot copy and destributed it without your permission.

Copyright's purpose is fundementally to protect artists and encourgae them to produce artistic works.

Trademark is something else entierly. A trademark is a symbol that a provider of goods uses to uniquely identify their goods. A trademark must be unique to be trademarkable. I can't go trademark the work "Computer." Its already part of the english language and therefor not unique. I COULD go trademark "Kesselputer" however (assuming noone else already controls that trademark.) The words in the above text are probably trademarkable because Andy made them up and noone else has them Trademarked.

A Trademark is NOT a Copyright. It does not prvent me from copying or using your trademark in my works. This is why Andy Worhole could paint campbells soup cans. The ONLY thing a trademark does is prevent me from using that trademark in a manner that would confuse a reasonable consumer as to the origin of a good. There is a similar set of laws for Servicemarks, which cover services in the same way trademarks cover goods. Roto-router, for instance, is a servicemark.

Trademarks exist to protect one company from having another company masquerade as them when selling to their customers. Thats it. Thats all it does.

Now Patents are also completely different. Patents protect processes. Not ideas, as is commonly thought, but processes for accomplishing an end. They were invented because manufacturing processes were being kept secret by individuals and companies as their competitive advantage. When those people died, their processes were lost with them. A classic example is the Stradavarius violin. There are still university reserach projects going on trying to figure out exactly how he got the sound he did.

Patent law has been streatched a great deal over the recent years but its stil fundementally the same thing. It exists in order to give inventors a safe way to record their inventions so they don't get lost when they die.

If the reporter above had understood ANY of this he or she might have realized that the paragraph they wrote was total gibberish. Hopefully now at least you will know such gibberish for what it is when you see it.

Posted at 04:12PM Apr 26, 2005 by gameguy in General  |  Comments[3]