Trademark, Copyright & Patent | What’s the difference?

Copyright, Trademark & Patent

Trademark:

It is any name, slogan, word, symbol, design, and/or image that identifies a business or brand and distinguishes it from others.

• Usage: Trademark rights might be utilized to keep others from utilizing a confusingly comparative imprint, however not to keep others from making the same products or from offering the same merchandise or administrations under a plainly distinctive imprint.
• Symbols: The two symbols associated with Indian trademarks ™ (the trademark symbol) and ® (the registered trademark symbol) represent the status of a mark and accordingly its level of protection. While ™ can be used with any common law usage of a mark, ® may only be used by the owner of a mark following registration with the relevant national authority.
• Governing Bodies: Indian trademark law statutorily protects trademarks as per the Trademark Act, 1999 and also under the common law remedy of passing off. It is administered by the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, a government agency which reports to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
• People who use trademark: manufacturers, business and product owners

Copyright :

It is a type of protection given to the creators of “unique works of initiation” including abstract, dramatic, musical, imaginative, and certain other scholarly works both distributed and unpublished.

• The Indian copyright law protects literary works, dramatic works, musical works, artistic works, cinematographic films and sound recordings.
• Rights: The rights provided under Copyright law include the rights of reproduction of the work, communication of the work to the public, adaptation of the work and translation of the work. The scope and duration of protection provided under copyright law varies with the nature of the protected work
• Governing Bodies: The Copyright Act, 1957 (as amended by the Copyright Amendment Act 2012) governs the subject of copyright law in India.
• People who use copyrights: authors, musicians, choreographers, artists, etc.

Patent:

A patent secures a development and advancements or changes consequently by furnishing the creator with an arrangement of select rights which keep others from making, utilizing, offering available to be purchased, or offering the innovation without the assent of the designer.

• Keep in mind: A thought in itself cannot be protected. The thought must be emerged into a creation, imaginative item, gadget or procedure that offers new answers for an issue all together for the registrant to have the capacity to look for the patent.
• A machine, method/process, manufacture, compositions of matter, and improvements of any of these items can be patented.
• Tenure: Term of every patent in India is 20 years from the date of filing of patent application, irrespective of whether it is filed with provisional or complete specification. However, in case of applications filed under PCT (Patent Cooperative Treaty) the term of 20 years begins from International filing date.
• Governing Bodies: The present Patents Act, 1970 came into force in the year 1972, amending and consolidating the existing law relating to Patents in India. The Patents Act, 1970 was again amended by the Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005, wherein product patent was extended to all fields of technology including food, drugs, chemicals and micro-organisms.
• The Indian Patent Office is administered by the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks (CGPDTM). This is a subordinate office of the Government of India and administers the Indian law of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks.
• People who use patents: Inventors

About the Author

This article has been authored by Surbhi Kohli, Founding Intern at LegalNow.