Trademarks: Trademark, patent, or copyright
Trademarks, patents, and copyrights are different types of intellectual property. The USPTO grants patents and registers trademarks. The U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress registers copyrights.
| Trademark | Patent | Copyright | |
| What’s legally protected? | A word, phrase, design, or a combination that identifies your goods or services, distinguishes them from the goods or services of others, and indicates the source of your goods or services. | Technical inventions, such as chemical compositions like pharmaceutical drugs, mechanical processes like complex machinery, or machine designs that are new, unique, and usable in some type of industry. | Artistic, literary, or intellectually created works, such as novels, music, movies, software code, photographs, and paintings that are original and exist in a tangible medium, such as paper, canvas, film, or digital format. |
| What’s an example? | Coca-Cola® for soft drinks | A new type of hybrid engine | Song lyrics to “Let It Go” from “Frozen” |
| What are the benefits of federal protection? | Protects the trademark from being registered by others without permission and helps you prevent others from using a trademark that is similar to yours with related goods or services. | Safeguards inventions and processes from other parties copying, making, using, or selling the invention without the inventor’s consent. | Protects your exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and perform or display the created work, and prevents other people from copying or exploiting the creation without the copyright holder’s permission. |
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