According to Villanova University, intellectual property practices focus on the legal rights to intangible assets, like patents, trademarks, and copyrights. If you’re filing for a patent, or are involved in some legal dispute involving a trademark, those are situations where you would go speak to a lawyer working at an intellectual property practice. An intellectual property lawyer can help you in a number of ways and this article will look at several of them.
- Help Prevent Trademark Infringement: One way an intellectual property practices and their lawyers can help you is by helping to prevent or stop trademark infringement from occurring. For example, say you’ve trademarked a specific phrase for your business. By trademarking this phrase, only you and your business have the right to use it for profit. But if someone else starts using the phrase themselves and profits from it, that’s trademark infringement which is illegal. An intellectual property lawyer can take the case and argue that this other person should stop using the trademark because legally it belongs to you. In this way, the lawyer can protect your trademark rights.
- Help File Your Patent: Another way an intellectual property lawyer can help you is by helping you file a patent on something you’ve invented. Patent law can be notoriously complex if you’ve never filed a patent before, and it can be confusing to work through it on your own. With the help of an intellectual property lawyer, you can be walked through the process of filing a patent and find out whether or not you can even have a patent created for your invention. Having the help of a lawyer can make this process much easier for you, especially if you’re going through it for the first time.
- Explain Copyright Law: A third way an intellectual property lawyer can help you is by explaining copyright law works. Copyright law, like patent law, can be very difficult to navigate, particularly in the digital age when an infinite amount of content is freely available on the Internet. While much of this content is indeed free to be used with no complications, some of it comes from copyrighted content that cannot be used in new works without permission. An intellectual property lawyer can help you if you have questions about what content you can and cannot use due to copyright issues. And if you want to appeal, claiming that copyright shouldn’t apply to a specific piece of content, an intellectual property lawyer can help with that as well.
In conclusion, there are several ways intellectual property practices can help you. These include helping to prevent trademark infringement, helping you file a patent, and explaining copyright law for those who have questions about how it works. These are, of course, just a few of the ways that intellectual property practices can help you, as they are trained to work with multiple intellectual property laws.
