Protect Your Intellectual Property
Patents, copyrights, and trademarks help you protect your intellectual property, but each serves a different purpose.
Call us or use the
Resource Navigator to find the KCSourceLink resource partners who can help you:
- determine whether you need a copyright, trademark, or patent
- review what can and cannot be protect as intellectual property
- weigh the costs for filing, obtaining, and maintaining a patent against your invention’s projected profitability
- evaluate the benefits, disadvantages, and scope of a copyrights or trademark
- evaluate the benefits and disadvantages of patents, including market life, market niche, and the time it takes to get a patent.
These Resource Partners specialize in copyrights, trademarks, or patents:
Who: Entrepreneurs of innovative, early-stage, high-growth companies, preferably in Johnson County
ECJC provides business consulting services, cost-effective office space, and shared resources in an entrepreneurial environment. Since 2000, ECJC companies have included technology, biotechnology, clean energy, and business services companies.
Who: Entrepreneurs with technology or high-growth businesses
In addition to a host of business support services, the institute helps high-growth and technology-based businesses with engineering support, advanced manufacturing, and intellectual property research and patent filing.
Small Business & Technology Development Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City
Who: Entrepreneurs with technology or high-growth businesses
UMKC’s SBTDC offers confidential one-on-one counseling, access to expertise and educational programs covering a wide-range of issues, including SBIR/STTR grants, feasibility, patents, equity valuation, secondary market research, corporate partnering, production planning, distribution, and access to venture capital, angels, and loans.
Who: Entrepreneurs with innovative technologies in Lawrence, KS, and surrounding communities
LRTC offers start-up entrepreneurs a full-service, corporate office environment and a spectrum of valuable "hands-on" business development and support services.
Who: Qualifying entrepreneurs
The Legal Clinic helps new entrepreneurs obtain the legal and business services they could not otherwise afford. They provide advice and assistance on copyright and trademark creation , but not patents.
What is a patent?
A U.S. patent gives inventors the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing the invention for a limited time. In exchange, inventors agree to publicly disclose the invention when the patent is granted.
Definitions are adapted from U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
What is a copyright?
Copyrights protect the form of expression, but not the subject matter of a literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work.
A copyright gives the owner exclusive right to:
- reproduce the copyrighted work
- create derivative works
- distribute copies of the copyrighted work
- perform the copyright work publicly
- display the copyrighted work publicly
What is a trademark or servicemark?
A word, name, symbol, or device, a trademark identifies and distinguishes the source of a product and is used to prevent others from adopting a similar mark. It does not prevent others from making or selling the product under a different mark. A servicemark identifies and distinguishes the source of a service.
Virtual Advisor has developed an overview on how to Protect Your Business with Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks.
SBTV interviews Cliff Ennico, SBTV legal expert, on What Copyrighting Means for Your Business.
And the federal government offers resources on the process of patenting, trademarking and copyrights, as well as an online search. You can find help at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the U.S. Copyright Office.