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Trademark law protects a company's goodwill, and helps consumers easily identify the source of the things they purchase. In principle, trademark law, by preventing others from copying a source-identifying mark, reduces the customer's costs of shopping and making purchasing decisions, for it quickly and easily assures a potential customer that this
Common types of intellectual property rights include copyright, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights, trade dress, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. They may be sometimes called intellectual rights. See outline of patents for a topical guide and overview of patents.
Violation of intellectual property rights, called "infringement" with respect to patents, copyright, and trademarks, and "misappropriation" with respect to trade secrets, may be a breach of civil law or criminal law, depending on the type of intellectual property involved, jurisdiction, and the nature of the action.
In the United States, the “functionality” doctrine exists to stop a party from obtaining exclusive trade dress or trademark rights in the functional features of a product or its packaging. The doctrine developed as a way to preserve the division between what trademark law protects and areas that are better protected by patent or copyright law.
Triadic patent – series of corresponding patents filed at the European Patent Office (EPO), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Japan Patent Office (JPO), for the same invention, by the same applicant or inventor. Triadic patents form a special type of patent family.
There are several types of intellectual property rights, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks, industrial designs, plant breeders rights [1] and trade secrets. Therefore, an intellectual property infringement may for instance be one of the following:
Patent applications can be filed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Prior to June 7, 1995, the duration of a US utility patent was 17 years from patent issuance. Since that date, the duration of the US utility patent is 20 years from the earliest effective filing date.
The Act reorganized the United States Patent Office, and strengthened the authority of the Patent Office to determine who would be granted a patent in cases where there was a dispute between the first to invent and the first to file. It also empowered the Patent Office to begin printing, and dropped the requirement that applicants submit two ...