An attorney who teaches law at AACC told students who want to own businesses to protect their intellectual property.

At an Entrepreneurs Club meeting in March, attorney Sandy Bartlett, who handles trademark and copyright searches, registration and maintenance, said business owners should trademark or patent their ideas and products.

“Great ideas aren’t protected by wishing, Bartlett said. “Great ideas are protected by doing.”
Intellectual property includes everything from symbols to names to designs to literary works to sound to songs to inventions to processes, she said.

Registering original works of authorship with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants the trademark holder rights like taking disputes over ownership to the federal court system.

Copyrights last for up to 95 years and patents, for 10 years with the option for renewal, she said. Like other property, patents can be inherited.

“You should treat your ideas like an asset,” Bartlett said.

She explained the five steps of content ownership: search/clear, apply, publish, use and register. Some of the steps require registration fees.

The most important claims for ownership, Bartlett explained, involved who used the product or idea first and whether it is too similar to others that already have copyrights, trademarks or patents. The question that determines that, she said, is, “Could a potential consumer mistake one product with another?”

Many of the students who attended the speech own businesses or aspire to.

“I am a sole proprietor,” said Entrepreneurs Club President Nyia Curtis, a second-year entrepreneur studies student and owner of a photography business. ”I thought that since everything was tied to me, it was already trademarked. … This answered a lot of big questions for me.”

Brittany Smith, a second-year web and interactive design student, said before this workshop she didn’t understand the difference among copyrights, trademarks and patents. Now that she does, she said, she “definitely want[s] to register my logo now.”