Week 5 Reaction - Copyright

What’s the difference?

  

Copyright protects expression

Copyright:  Copyright is a form of intellectual property protected under Constitutional law covering both published and unpublished “original works of authorship,” including scholarly, literary, and artistic works including stage and theater, musical scores, soundtracks and songs, poetry, novels, movies, and computer software. The copyright protects the form of authorship but does not protect the actual facts, ideas, or systems being represented. Essentially, copyright covers the way subject matter is expressed. A photo or a soundtrack are also methods of describing a location or an emotion.  The location cannot be copyrighted, nor the emotion, but the expression of each can be. If you understand the operation or usefulness of a safety pin in a uniquely different way, and describe in original language your conceptualization of it, then only your description is protected under copyright.  Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.  

Trademarks protect branding

Trademark:  Trademarks protects words, phrases, designs, symbols, or devices used in trade which identify the source of good and distinguishes them from goods of others. A trademark prevents others from using similar and misleading marks, but does not prevent others from manufacturing or selling the same goods under a distinctly different mark. Controversies about the use of trademarks in the branding of geographic areas (“The Branding of America”) have created civic debates and litigation when popular regional vernacular, part of the public domain, is trademarked by a corporation.  In Montana, the Paws Up luxury resort in the verdant Blackfoot Valley (owned by an out–of–state Las Vegas businessman) tried to trademark the shared, common use, and locally beloved phrase, “Last Best Place.”  A statewide uprising ended with Federally sponsored legislation to prevent that particular trademarking. Trademarks are registered with the Patent and Trademark Office.  

Servicemark:  A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies, distinguishes, and protects the source of a service rather than an actual and tangible product. The terms "trademark" and "mark" are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

The safety pin, patented in 1849

Patent:  Patents are issued for inventions and grant property rights to the inventor. Those property rights conferred by the patent are "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States.   Essentially, a patent excludes others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention.  Back to that safety pin.  Let’s say that rather than having an artistic epiphany about the use of the safety pin, you actually invent a completely different (and hopefully better) safety pin.  Here is where you protect the actual object from re-creation.  The idea is not new (the safety pin was first patented in 1849).  The scientific description of the safety pin is factual, so not protected. Only the object itself, an original invention, is protected from replication.

How this translates: An example. The “Omeka” name is trademarked, as is the logo, which prevents others from marketing products under similar branding. The Omeka website is copyrighted, and the original form of authorship cannot be copied.  The software application behind Omeka, GNU operating system and web-publishing platform, are both open source, which means the software is freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification.