Trademark lawyers can also be sought to make sure that your new business isn’t using a registered mark. The consequences for using a registered mark, even though you may have put money and advertising into promoting your business, include being sued for infringement.

Copyrights

Copyrights protect individual’s expression of an idea, but do not protect idea itself (see patent). Copyrights are intended to promote scientific progress. You can copyright your writing, performance (music, dance), art, sound, compilations. You cannot copyright ideas or uncompiled facts, words, or phrases (these could be registered as trademarks, though, so consult an intellectual property lawyer). If you come up with an idea or invention while working for a company, it is able to be patented or trademarked by company you work for, but copyrightable work belongs to you, employee, not company employing you. However, there are loopholes, and an intellectual property lawyer will help you both with process of getting your expression copyrighted but will also save you trouble and time in getting over road blocks.

If you are a company, you need an intellectual property lawyer who specializes in copyrights because especially with internet businesses, you will need to make sure that contractually your web site design can be copyrighted to your company and will not belong to employee or independent contractor who created it. This also applies to software.

Trade Secrets

It is important to protect your business’ trade secrets so they will not be misappropriated. Whereas patents have a limited time of coverage and after 20 years are released, trade secrets are always protected. To qualify as a trade secret, it must have independent economic value to company. For example, recipe for Coca-Cola is a trade secret, not a patent, and therefore will never be released because without maintaining secrecy of recipe, business would not be able to compete by offering an individual product. GA

Find an Intellectual Property Lawyer associated with a major Intellectual Property Law Firm today at http://www.hugesettlements.com/articles/Baldwin_Intellectual_Property.htm

Class action lawsuits have many benefits. They are more efficient, presenting witnesses and exhibits and facts of case all at once rather than holding up courts with trying them separately. They spread burden of cost between all different plaintiffs who, on their own, might not have been able to file suits. Furthermore, if recoveries are small (although no less significant to individual) it is not cost beneficial to file a suit independently because of fees. They ensure that all plaintiffs get their portion of settlement; here, plaintiffs who first complained are not given extra money. GA