Trademark, copyright or patent — what each one actually protects

The one-line version, and then the part that matters

The US Patent and Trademark Office draws the line as plainly as anyone: a trademark protects a word, phrase, design or combination that identifies your goods or services and distinguishes them from someone else's; a patent protects technical inventions — a composition, a mechanical process, a machine design — that are new, unique and usable; copyright protects artistic, literary or intellectually created works, such as novels, music, films, software code, photographs and paintings.

That much is easy. The part that causes trouble is that a single product is normally covered by all three simultaneously, in different places, and by a fourth regime that involves no registration at all.

Why "I want to copyright my business name" is the expensive sentence

It cannot be done, and the reason is not a technicality. The Copyright Office states directly that copyright does not protect titles, names, short phrases and slogans, familiar symbols or designs, mere variations of typographic ornamentation, or listings of ingredients. Copyright protects expression — and a two-word name has not got enough of it.

A brand name is therefore either trademark territory or unprotected. That matters because the people asking the question are usually trying to stop a competitor using their name, and they spend weeks pursuing a right that was never available while the actual right — which arises from use, and which they may already have — goes unclaimed.

The reverse confusion is just as common. A logo is usually both — a trademark, because it identifies source, and a copyright work, because someone drew it. Which regime you invoke depends on what the other side did. Copying your logo onto their own competing product is a trademark problem. Putting your illustration on a poster with their own name on it is a copyright problem.

They switch on at completely different moments

This is the difference that decides what you have to do, and when.

The USPTO puts the patent bargain plainly: a patent gives the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale or selling the invention, and in exchange the application must contain a clear description of how to make and use it. Most applications publish at or after 18 months from filing, and granted patents are public on their issue date. Anyone can read yours, including the competitor you were worried about.

Two businesses can own the same word

Trademark rights do not attach to a word in the abstract. They attach to a mark used for particular goods or services, and the test for conflict is likelihood of confusion: whether the marks are confusingly similar and the goods or services are related enough that a buyer would think they came from the same source.

The USPTO's own illustration of the point is that identical trademarks with different owners are registered for Dove soap and Dove ice cream bars, and for Delta faucets and Delta air transportation services. Marks can also be confusingly similar without being identical — alike in sound, in appearance, or in the commercial impression they leave. "T. Markey" and "Tee Marquee" is the office's example of the first.

The fourth regime, which is the absence of one

Trade secrets protect information that has independent economic value because it is not generally known and not readily ascertainable by proper means, where the owner has taken reasonable measures to keep it secret. Formulas, source code, manufacturing processes, pricing models and customer data are the usual examples.

This is the alternative to patenting, not a supplement to it, because the two are mutually exclusive on the same subject matter: one requires publication, the other requires secrecy. It is also the weakest of the four in one specific respect — reverse engineering and independent discovery are lawful, and neither is misappropriation. Everything else about it is behavioural: restricted access, marked documents, and an NDA signed before anything is shown to anyone outside the business. What actually counts as a trade secret covers the test and where secrecy programmes break down.

Mapping what you have

That last line is the one that undoes the rest. All four regimes assume you own the thing. If a freelancer drew the logo, wrote the code or shot the photographs, you probably do not — payment alone transfers nothing — and an IP assignment is the document that fixes it. Registering a trademark for a logo you do not own is a real and fairly common way to spend money on a problem you have not solved.

Where the money actually goes

For most small businesses the honest allocation is uneven. The trademark on the name is usually worth registering, because the right is comparatively cheap, lasts indefinitely and covers the asset that customers actually navigate by. Copyright needs no spending at all to exist, and spending is only warranted where you expect to enforce. Patents are expensive, slow and disclosure-heavy, and are worth it in a narrow set of cases — mostly where the invention is the business rather than a feature of it. Trade secrecy costs nothing in fees and everything in discipline.

The one thing worth doing regardless of budget is the mapping itself. Knowing which regime covers which asset takes an afternoon, tells you what you can and cannot stop someone doing, and stops you paying a filing fee for the wrong right — which is the single most common way this subject wastes money.