You might also want to trademark your business name or domain name to protect it. You can trademark on a national or statewide level. To register your business as a local trademark, contact the Secretary of State’s office in your area. To register as a national trademark, you will need to contact the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov).

They also have a search engine (Trademark Electronic Search System, or TESS) that can help you determine if the name has already been trademarked.
IP PROTECTION

A trademark is a word, name, or symbol that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark.

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An industrial design relates to the external appearance of a finished product. It is defined by the product’s unique attributes, such as shape, contours, color, ornamentation, pattern, configuration, material and texture.

For instance, an industrial design can be a design on a vase to a font style and everything in between. Industrial designs are valuable intellectual property because creating them from scratch requires a great deal of investment in terms of money, resources and man-hours.

A unique design can add substantial commercial value to a product and increase its marketability.

Copyright is a form of protection provided to the authors of “original works of authorship”, including: literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works whether or not they were published.

Unless you state otherwise, no one can make copies, even if they give you credit. The same holds true if you wish to use information. Unless you have permission or the work does not have a copyright, you may not use what is already written as your own.

Our world is becoming more and more intertwined as the Internet grows into an everyday network.