What's the difference between a Trademark and copyright?

A trademark or trade mark, identified by the symbols ™ and ®, or mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization or other legal entity to identify that the products and/or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source of origin, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities. A trademark is a type of intellectual property, and typically a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements. There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these standard categories.

The owner of a registered trademark may commence legal proceedings for trademark infringement to prevent unauthorized use of that trademark. However, registration is not required. The owner of a common law trademark may also file suit, but an unregistered mark may be protectable only within the geographical area within which it has been used or in geographical areas into which it may be reasonably expected to expand.

A trademark is something you have to register and pay for, but is a lot more concrete than normal copyright, because you have it all on file when you register it.

But a trademark lasts for less time than copyright, because you have to keep trading and registering your trademark every so often.

BBC REPORT:

A row over the colour orange could hit the courts after mobile phone giant Orange launched action against a new mobile venture from Easyjet's founder.

Orange said it was starting proceedings against the Easymobile service for trademark infringement.

Easymobile uses Easygroup's orange branding. Founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou has pledged to contest the action.

The move comes after the two sides failed to come to an agreement after six months of talks.

Orange claims the new low-cost mobile service has infringed its rights regarding the use of the colour orange and could confuse customers - known as "passing off".

Legal battle looms

"Our brand, and the rights associated with it are extremely important to us," Orange said in a statement.

"In the absence of any firm commitment from Easy, we have been left with no choice but to start an action for trademark infringement and passing off."

However, Mr Haji-Ioannou, who plans to launch Easymobile next month, vowed to fight back, saying: "We have nothing to be afraid of in this court case.

"It is our right to use our own corporate colour for which we have become famous during the last 10 years."

The Easyjet founder also said he planned to add a disclaimer to the Easygroup website to ensure customers are aware the Easymobile brand has no connection to Orange.

The new service is the latest venture from Easygroup, which includes a chain of internet cafes, budget car rentals and an intercity bus service.

Easymobile will allow customers to go online to order SIM cards and airtime - which will be rented from T-Mobile - for their existing handsets. 

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This is a rather interesting case as before hand i did not realize you could trademark a color in a certain market,  and but you can if your product belongs in a different then its ok.

The reason for having such a unique thing trademarked is so customers don't get confused, as long as a random customer off the street can tell the difference between the colors then its acceptable.

Because Orange has been trading with this color in this market for such a long time, easy will more than likely lose the law suit because they only have the color in the different markets.

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators.

The original set of licenses all grant the "baseline rights". The details of each of these licenses depends on the version, and comprises a selection of four conditions:

• Attribution (by): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.

• Noncommercial or NonCommercial (nc): Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works based on it only for noncommercial purposes.

• No Derivative Works or NoDerivs (nd): Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based on it.

• ShareAlike (sa): Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs the original work. (See also copyleft.)

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "nd" and "sa" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses. The five of the eleven valid licenses that lack the Attribution element have been phased out because 98% of licensors requested Attribution, but are still available for viewing on the website. There are thus six regularly used licenses:

1. Attribution alone (by)
2. Attribution + Noncommercial (by-nc)
3. Attribution + NoDerivs (by-nd)
4. Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa)
5. Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)
6. Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa)

This is the world renowned symbol for something that is copyrighted, you can say something is copyrighted as soon as its made but as a result of instant copyright you have a much harder time proving to a random person that you were indeed the one that first made it, Which is not a factor when you have to go register something somewhere.

Newspaper Website

Another website that has been copied pretty much identically, it is quite easy to download a page of code and images from a website and recreate it, but they actually made the layout worse. They are completely missing a column and its way too much space to leave blank in the middle of the page.

I can half understand taking someone else's site to make it better but to steal it and then bastardize it in such a way is like pouring salt into the wound.

Obama's stunning layout copied.

The Barack Obama website is defiantly one of the great websites of 08 with its perfect color scheme, clean layout and bright imagery so good in-fact that another president wanna be has completely copied the landmark design pretty much word for word.. but in Israeli.

Just because its from a different country they think no one will notice that they have not even tried to come up with a unique design yourself.

But due to different laws in different countries, is this even classed as stealing in Israel? 

Copyright Breif

We have been set a copyright brief and we must decide through research if we are for or against it.

Before i get around to doing the research i can very much say that i am all for copyright overall i like how it protects an artists work for being exploited and copied, it protects the integrity of the industry we are in. there are also bad points with the system too but will go more into that from my perspective later on.

i am going to be posting some examples of some famous copyright infringements and incidents along with some common ones and also how some people get away with it.