What are Copyright Registration, Patent Pending, and Trademarking?
As a web professional, one must have a good understanding of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I basic question in many web designers’ mind is, “how do I do copyright registration of my design? You may also be thinking about patenting your ideas and wondering what is patent pending. You may have just coined a great word and thinking about trademarking it.
A copyright is the expression of an idea. You cannot copyright the idea itself. However, ideas can be patented and I will talk about patents later.
Let’s consider the example of a story: a poor man who found lots of cash on his way back to his home from his work. He decided to keep the cash to improve his financial situation. But he could not sleep at night because he was haunted by strange voices that told him to find the owner and return the cash. This idea cannot be protected. Anybody can write a short story based on the idea. What is protected is how the author expresses the idea in the form of texts, illustrations, drawings, photographs, etc.
