Copyrights - Who knows about them?

**MsNadi** · 09-13-2006 03:18 PM

Ok. This is a continuation of my "don't overnegotiate post". In efforts to ease my mind and avoid issues, i've purchased the .net address. My partner and I like the name a lot, have developed a logo for it and even see potential marketing opportunities with it. SO we're ready to run with it.

Is it a good idea to copyright/trademark the words (like Yahoo! or Google) thereby preventing anyone from using the term (and potentially the .com version of the site)?

I noticed that a lot of domains are trademarked (google, blackplanet, digg, friendster) and some aren't (myspace, myyearbook, facebook) aren't. What are the advantages if any?

And while we're at it - what's the difference between a trademark and a copyright?

**gambit** · 09-13-2006 04:49 PM

Why not just get the .com, .net, .org, .info and etc..? and regsiter your business name locally.

You can copyright the name but what can you do if someone took the .us per say? Are you going to sue them one by one?

**MsNadi** · 09-13-2006 05:29 PM

Originally Posted by gambit

Why not just get the .com, .net, .org, .info and etc..? and regsiter your business name locally.

You can copyright the name but what can you do if someone took the .us per say? Are you going to sue them one by one?

No. Not for the sake of suing...and frankly, I could care less about the .org, .info addresses.

The problem is we don't have the .COM and we're hoping that by pursuing the IP we can prevent the person from trying to do anything worthwhile with the .COM (although i don't know if that EVER happens anyway).

**Jason_Els** · 09-13-2006 06:22 PM

Copyright is created for original works of art. This includes music, advertising copy, photographs, newspapers, brochures, unique drawings or graphic designs, plays, books, magazines, performances, broadcasts, poetry, sculpture, electronic content, and anything else that constitutes any original creation that can be described in a medium.

Copyright is created at the same time the work is. You have copyright as soon as your work is assigned to paper or affixed to film or some other medium. No legal transaction needs to take place, no government agency notified. All you have to do is say that a thing is copyright and it becomes so. To help defend your copyright you must send a copy or exact likeness of the work (e.g. the script of a play, photographs of a sculpture, a DVD of your film or website, an edition of your magazine) to the copyright office of your country, usually with a form and a fee. This will establish the date of your creation and should anyone else claim to own your work then it will help you legally defend your claim to original creation, but it is not essential. All that is essential is for you to state that a work is copyright in the publication of that work. Be aware that you will hear that all you have to do is mail yourself a copy of a work in a sealed envelope to create a defensible copyright. This is completely untrue and has no standing of defense in any US court of law.

A trademark is a logo or other device, which may or may not include wording, used by a company to represent its image to the public. It need not be wholly original but it must be sufficiently distinctive from other trademarks. This can be a bit tricky as distinctiveness can be a subjective thing. Some people have attempted to claim common phrases and words as trademarks. Yahoo!'s trademark isn't the word, "yahoo", which is an already existing word in wide usage. It's the style of the font and the exclamation point which create sufficient distinctiveness from the common word to make it trademarkable. As with copyright, a trademark need not be registered with a government office to be considered defensable but it certainly helps even more so than with copyright as proof of originality can be harder to establish than with copyright. Trademarks which have been granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office are designated with the symbol ®. Those which are not registered or are pending registration (which can take longer than a year) may use the symbol ™ next to every instance of the trademark where it appears on ANY corporate material. Other countries use different symbols.

Trademarking isn't so clear as copyright but in either event, if you have any intellectual property you have uniquely created, it should state that it's either copyrighted or trademarked and a trademark should always be registered.

Should your product or trademark suffer the horror of extreme popularity, you can lose your trademark! "Aspirin" used to be a trademarked name but the name became so popular that the public came to refer to every instance of acetylsalicylic acid powders (no wonder!) as, "aspirin." As a result the trademark was lost because the word had become a vernacular that could no longer distinctively describe the product. Other terms such as "Kleenex" and "Windex" have come perilously close to the same fate. To prevent that fate, the holders of the trademarks must, "vigorously defend" the trademark at every opportunity. Look at the saga of the fake Izod Lacoste shirts cataloged elsewhere on this forum. Lacoste invented the logo polo shirt and since then many people refer to such shirts, no matter the manufacturer, as an "Izod." To prevent loss of trademark, Lacoste's lawyers must challenge every instance of anyone using that term, their logo, or their trademark. Should anyone challenge Lacoste's trademark in court, Lacoste can point to instances where Lacoste has fought to prevent their trademark from being used by others. If Lacoste just sat back and allowed people to use any part of their trademark figuring perhaps that all those little companies wouldn't dent their profits enough to be worth the effort, then they could actually lose their right to trademark as they made little or no effort to defend it. Even trademark registration cannot prevent its loss if Lacoste does not make reasonable effort to protect its property. The most similar instance is that of adverse possession of real estate (i.e. squatting), where someone could lose ownership of land by allowing someone else to have whole use and ownership of it without attempt on the part of the original owner to enforce ownership.

Either way, check out United States Patent and Trademark Office for further details. There are also numerous publications on the subject. For the small business owner, a trademark should be registered or be in the process of registration before it becomes part of the business's usage. Copyright material should be generally be stated as such in every instance of its publication though not necessarily registered by the US Copyright Office unless you believe the material could be used by others because you do not have sufficient proof of publication. For example, an original ad you place in a newspaper would be enough to prove publication but a website may not necessarily be able to as it is not a fixed medium with sufficient widespread publication at a proven date. It's a bit fuzzy, but generally, copyright is much easier to defend than trademark.

Hope this helps!

**MsNadi** · 09-13-2006 07:14 PM

Wow jason! Thanks.

Here's my question: why have some internet companies chosen to Trademark their logos and brand names while others have chosen to Copyright? i.e. Google Trademarked. Yahoo Copyrighted. Ebay Copyrighted. Skype trademarked. Digg trademarked. Netflix did neither. :shrug:

**Jason_Els** · 09-13-2006 08:44 PM

Because they are two different concepts and different laws apply to rights of usage and defensibility. In some cases, Yahoo! uses its trademark (and it is identifiable as such by the ® symbol in the lower right of the trademark) as actual wording in copy and, at other times, as symbol of the company itself. Same with Ebay. Visit their sites and you'll see the symbol. Google's trademark is represented by the ™ symbol meaning they reserve rights to the word, font, and likeness of the trademark. And defend they will have to! The term, "googling", is entering common usage and threatens to dilute the Google trademark because of its popularity. This is the danger with trademarks. Too unknown and it's not a good marketing tool, too well-known and it threatens to become a common word. Google did an interesting thing with their name. Many tech geeks are familiar with the term, "googol", which is a word coined to describe, "1 followed by 100 zeros." Since this was already a vernacular word, and thus not protected, Google chose to deliberately use a homonym of its own creation thus conveying the concept of a googol by using a trademarkable word.

Remember that copyrighting is used to protect a unique expression of information whether visually, audibly, or in print. What you may be seeing are the web pages or printed literature of the companies themselves, which would be copyrighted, but the trademarks contained within those pages are still trademarked. Trademarking is the use of a device to sybolize the company itself.

Trademarking is very old, having been around about 5,000 years. The most popular examples are the names of publican houses in the UK. The names we know them as now, "Queen Anne's Bloomers", "The Harlot's Head and Foot", "King George's Head", all came about because so few people could read. These businesses would place carvings or pictures of what the business was. Thus for "Queen Anne's Bloomers" you'd have a picture or carving of petticoats surmounted by a crown. If you couldn't read, you should at least have the smarts to figure out the picture. Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, even Mesopotamians did exactly the same thing. If you were a merchant back in Mesopotamia you'd use a seal for your name. Any time you had to sign a document you'd use your seal to indicate you approved it. It might be something like 3 goats in a tree, a picture showing your devotion to a particular god, or something similar. At some point, if you wanted people to know your shop, you'd commission an aritsan to create a sign to put on your building, based on your seal, so people would see it and recognize it as you. Over time all these things became trademarks. Even since those times it was considered unlawful for one man to copy to the seal of another so that the two were indistinguishable. The penalties were as stiff as for forgery because that's exactly what it was. The law hasn't changed since, though fortunately the penalties (death, really nasty long painful death, quick death, more death, and death again) have.

http://www.edgarlowen.com/b2895.jpg
Mesopotamian cylinder seal, ca. 2nd millenium BC

**akula** · 09-14-2006 12:28 AM

such warm fuzzy feeling all over

another lawyer at ye

I'm stocked!

yo, Jason_Els, whatup cuz!

**Jason_Els** · 09-14-2006 02:12 AM

What gave you the impression I was a lawyer?

I'm a tech support guy who's way underpaid taking phone calls from people who can't figure out how to make their internet work. Since it's New York they tend to be rude and condescending. I have to ask permission to take lunch and notify the supervisor when I have to use the bathroom. I was passed over for promotion after being told I didn't have enough experience only to have someone I trained get the position.

The following is the text of an email which was sent to us by our new manager:

Team,
Please allow me take a moment and remind us all that we take pride in our work. We are the last level of support for [XYZ]’s High Speed Data and Digital Phone customers. When asked what it is I do for a living, I proudly respond. “I work with the best of the best in the [XYZ] support center and we are the last level of support. If we don’t know the resolution to a problem, we don’t give up until we find the resolution!”

I challenge you to utilize your individuality and knowledge to take the next step closer to success. Dress for the job we want, rather than the job we have.

Needless to say, he's a dork with no clue how business works but figures if he sucks-up hard enough it's bound to get him somewhere. Sadly, I know his boss and let's say just say the previous person in his position only lasted 3 months before he quit.

So I've had it working for idiots.

**akula** · 09-14-2006 03:19 AM

haha, that's hilarious

send me your cv if you wanna do a startup or something

we've got a really good one cooking

I wouldn't say we are the complete opposite of idiots, but we definitely (as MSFT says) suck less :-)

**Jason_Els** · 09-14-2006 03:55 AM

Thanks Daniel, much appreciated. I'm doing my own startup now but have more than a few ideas cooking. I'd love the chance to visit Aussie (or move there after the dollar collapses as natural-resource based economies will flourish) though it seems all the famous people there are dying en masse and I hope it isn't spreading to the general population.

**gambit** · 09-14-2006 10:13 AM

Pretty much sums it up. Its time to start your own.

Originally Posted by Jason_Els

What gave you the impression I was a lawyer?

I'm a tech support guy who's way underpaid taking phone calls from people who can't figure out how to make their internet work. Since it's New York they tend to be rude and condescending. I have to ask permission to take lunch and notify the supervisor when I have to use the bathroom. I was passed over for promotion after being told I didn't have enough experience only to have someone I trained get the position.

The following is the text of an email which was sent to us by our new manager:

Needless to say, he's a dork with no clue how business works but figures if he sucks-up hard enough it's bound to get him somewhere. Sadly, I know his boss and let's say just say the previous person in his position only lasted 3 months before he quit.

So I've had it working for idiots.