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What do I do about trademarks, copyrights and patents when starting a business?

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David Krauskopf Fred Glave
www.scoredc.org  

David Krauskopf is an entrepreneur experienced in starting, financing and growing several companies with direct experience in travel, hospitality, software, computer, and retail industries.   His specialties are in business planning, marketing (internet particularly) and financial management.  David was the general manager of Apple Computer in Russia from (1993-1999) and owned the exclusive representative for Apple Computer in Russia and the Ukraine.  He founded a printing and press room solutions company in Russia in 1996, and these combined companies in 2007 had over $300M in sales revenue.   David helped start and was on the advisory board of Travelpost.com that was acquired by Sidestep in 2007.  In 2000, David developed and now owns Hamanasi Adventure Resort (<a>www.hamanasi.com</a> ), a high-end boutique resort in Belize, Central America.  This resort has 70 employees, high operating margins and is currently ranked number one in Belize and Central America by the hotel review web site TripAdvisor.com.  Mr. Krauskopf lives in Northern Virginia, is an angel investor with New Vantage Group (<a>www.newvantagegroup.com</a>) , David is a volunteer SCORE (<a>www.score.org</a>) business counselor partnering with the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority and for two years has been an Assistant Wrestling coach at Langley High School.  David holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management (2005) and a B.S. degree in Management from Miami University. 

What do I do about trademarks, copyrights and patents when starting a business?

 

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Host: What do I do about trademarks, copyrights and patterns when starting a business?

Fred Glave: Trademarks particularly or service marks are really any identifying terms or symbols that are used in commerce and they are protected by both and state and federal law. You can also look at them as a very valuable marketing entity. Of course, some very famous trademarks are Coca Cola, Microsoft, etcetera. But even in your business if you establish a trademark or a service name of any kind, you do want to register and protect it and in fact, often before you select a trade name or a trademark, you mat want to do a search to make sure that it is available. To register a trademark, you can do it yourself by going to www.

uspto.

gov .

Copyrights are a different matter and they are used to protect any kind of original intellectual property, be it written documents, software program, music or etcetera. Now you can copyright any material that you produce by simply writing a copyright notice on that material. Even in the software program the very first frame that comes up when you load such a program, you should put a copyright mark on it. If you want to have a more secure and more easily defendable copyright, you can register it with the US Copyright office. That office is run by the Library of Congress, believe it or not and you simply may call at 202-7073000 to determine how to file a copyright registration. Now all of these matters, particularly with respect to copyrights are extremely complex and involve a lot of legal esoterica. When you come to patterns, the thing becomes even more complex and in fact, we now have a process in US law whereby you can file a provisional patent application which gives you protection for a year until you very go through the more formal process of filing a complete patent application. You should consult a patent attorney and again, a SCORE counselor can assist you in directing you to the right resources in order to file such a patent. 1

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