Difference Between Copyright And Trademark
Firstly let me just quickly read this description of the difference between copyright and trademark. I found it online. So while both offer intellectual property protection, they protect different types of assets. Copyright is geared towards literacy and artistic works such as books and videos. A trademark protects items that help define a company’s brand, such as its logo. So if we zoom into this. Copyright is like original works of authorship such as books, articles, songs, photographs, sculptures, choreography, sound recordings, motion picture and other works.
Trademark is any word, phrase, symbol and or design that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others. So it’s very important to understand the difference between a trademark and copyright and a lot of the time people are saying how can I check the copyright?
Firstly. Checking copyright isn’t so easy. Anything that someone makes technically is copyrighted. If I design ‘PT shirt’ that doesn’t exist yet, that is now copyrighted. You cannot design the exact same T-shirt. However, you can design a very similar T-shirt and just change it like a tiny little bit. It’s very simple to get around that which is why it’s so hard to actually copyright it. For a example, if someone took a photo, I could take the exact same photo at just shutter speed higher and it would be different photos. Copyright is very hard to kind of. So if you have PT shirt design, we’re going to stick with T-shirts, we’re not going to say you’re doing mugs or socks or anything. Let’s just say T-shirts. If you have PT Shirt Design and you want to know if it’s copyrighted, let’s say your design is. Dogs, the Pug Life T-shirt. What you would do is you would search Google for pug life. You would do as much research as you possibly could to try and find that exact design. If you cannot find it, then go ahead for trademark registration. You can assume that no one has done it before. If someone comes along and says actually that’s my design, we’ll find out what they published it and if they published it before you, then yes it was their design. But if they published it after you, then it’s your design. So that is how you can do the copywriting side of it, the trade marking side of it, which doesn’t really come into play so much with the print on demand business except for like the obvious ones like the motion picture, The Avengers, Disney, that kind of stuff. That’s all trademarked, that sort of stuff you can’t even begin to create anything around.
How to check Trademark
The way you would check that is literally you would go to a website called https://tmrsearch.ipindia.gov.in/tmrpublicsearch/frmmain.aspx. You would put your search in over there, click search, and you would see if something has been trademarked, right? It’s simple, so that how you would check the trademark using government website. How you would check copyright and that is how you would check trademark. Try and be careful with these kind of things. You do not want to be getting sued, you just want to try and start your own business. Now a lot of the time with websites like Bata India, Tata Motors EV, Amazon India. If you create something that is copyrighted or trademarked, a lot of the time it flags up automatically and removes that listing. So that in itself is quite good because if you if you launch something that you weren’t sure about and then it deletes, then you can assume it was copyrighted or trademarked. So that is that is a good way. But other than that don’t panic, don’t worry about these kind of things. Look no one is coming after your entire family money and your house and your car. Really don’t worry, just do your due diligence and be a bit careful and you’ll be absolutely fine.
