For those of you who are unfamiliar with patents here is a primer describing the basics of patents and answering some of the common questions that novice or newbie inventors have about patents.

Let’s start with what exactly a patent is. Although most folks believe a patent gives you with “protection” for your idea. Really a patent gives you with “offensive” rights. It does not shield you from infringing other patents which would be a “defensive” appropriate.

US Patents are grants from the US government that confer upon inventors the correct to exclude other people from making, making use of, selling, importing, or offering an invention for sale for approximately 17 years, 20 years from the date of filing of the patent.

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Appropriately thought out and managed trademark license arrangements can be win-win opportunities for all parties, which includes the public. The document that goes a lengthy way toward realizing this opportunity is the trademark license agreement. This agreement is a written contract in which the holder of a trademark (licensor) grants the revocable correct to a second party (licensee) to use the holder’s trademark in exchange for royalty fees. Without having the license, the licensee could not legally use the trademark.

Trademarks are a type of intellectual property. Trademarks are distinctive signs or indicators-generally phrases, logos, slogans, designs, images, or combinations thereof-that identify a particular company or organization to the public. Protected marks are accompanied by the superscript “TM” for trademark, “SM” for service mark, or the encircled “R.” They are comparable to copyrights and patents but also have distinct differences. One of them is the protection they receive. Copyright protection spans the length of the author’s lifetime plus another 70 years even so, trademark protection is typically only five years, and it need to be attentively guarded.

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Unlike other forms of intellectual property (e.g., patents and copyrights) trademarks can, in theory, be maintained forever.  To do so, nevertheless, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) maintains strict and unwavering requirements concerning the maintenance of U.S. Trademark Registrations.    As such, when a Trademark Registration is received, you need to calendar these essential deadlines or use a service to do so to make certain that your Trademark Registration is not permitted to lapse.

Of note, several trademark owners do not comprehend that when a trademark is registered it can still be canceled through a Cancellation Proceeding initiated by any party who feels that it could be injured by the continued registration of the trademark.  Typical grounds for cancellation proceedings include, but are not limited to: (1) a likelihood of confusion with another trademark wherein the other trademark claims priority of use (2) that the registered trademark is merely descriptive and, as such, is incapable of functioning as a trademark (three)  fraud perpetrated in the filing or maintenance of the registration and (3) abandonment or non-use of the mark with out an intent to resume use thereof.

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