When you hear the phrase intellectual property, what do you think of? How can something that exists in your mind be considered property? Are your ideas your property similar to that of your house or car?

Simply put, no, your ideas are not something you can solely own. After all, if ideas were never shared in the marketplace, where would we be? Imagine if Bill Gates had never shared his ideas about the new BASIC programming language that he and Paul Allen developed…would Microsoft exist? How would that have impacted our world today? Let’s take it back even further: what would life be like if Louis Pasteur had never shared his ideas about heat treatment, what we now call pasteurization? The sharing of ideas has brought us to where we are, good and bad.

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If you are trying to register any type of newspaper, magazine or other periodically occurring work you should follow the copyright process as explained here. Serial and periodical works can generally be described as any work issued in parts that can be chronologically tracked by a numeric or alphabetical series.

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In Alcon Inc v Of Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) [2005], a mark was refused registration because the public was likely to confuse the mark with another similar mark.

In 1998, Alcon filed an application for registration of the word mark TRAVATAN in respect of goods within Class 5, in particular ophthalmic pharmaceutical preparations.

In 1999, Biofarma SA filed an opposition against registration of TRAVATAN, arguing that there would be confusion with the word mark TRIVASTAN, registered in Italy in 1986. This earlier trade mark was also registered under Class 5 covering pharmaceutical, veterinary, hygiene products and others.

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When most people consider writing a book, they don’t think
about Trademarks. However, I highly recommend that you
leverage your writing for multiple purposes, and that’s why
registering a Trademark for your concept is a good idea. If
you use your writing as the basis for workshops and other
products, it’s in your best interests to protect your
concepts with a Trademark.

To paraphrase the definition of a Trademark given at the
official web site www.uspto.gov, a Trademark is a symbol, a
word, a phrase, or a design, (or any combination), used to
identify and distinguish the unique source of goods. Note
that a Service Mark has the same definition as a Trademark,
except as related to services instead of products.

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The legal protection known has “copyright” has come front and center over the past few years with major legal rulings regarding peer-to-peer networks on the Internet. Copyright protection, however, can be a confusing area of the law. This article details what can and cannot be protected by copyright.

Copyright Protection? - Yes

Copyright protects “original works of authorship” in a tangible, fixed form of expression. The material does need to be directly perceptible as long as it can be expressed with the aid of technology. A good example of this is a movie, which requires a projection device of some sort.

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