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Intellectual Property Law Questions
Intellectual property can be separated into two areas based on who the laws are designed to protect. One area of intellectual property law focuses on copyright by protecting against infringement of artistic, literary, or musical creations. A second area of intellectual property focuses on protecting industries by counseling on trade secret protection, trademark application, logo protection, patent application and patent infringement. Intellectual property rights are granted for a specific number of years.
Copyrights provide protection for the authors life and an additional fifty years after he dies. In contrast, patents expire in 20 years. Occasionally, a patent will be extended, which is common in the drug industry where testing is necessary before a patent is approved.
Intellectual property attorneys also conduct due diligence investigations to identify potential liabilities relating to the product, confirm ownership of the patent, and ensure that the invention is not covered by prior patents.
Now that most businesses have websites, intellectual property attorneys perform clearance studies to ensure that you do not spend lot of money on a domain name only to find that another company has already claimed a similar name. Intellectual property also encompasses analysis and representation of cyber squatting cases which occur when someone creates a similarly named website to confuse customers resulting in monetary gain because of the similarity.
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