Intellectual Property
Your inventions, products, and brands can be some of your most valuable assets. Protecting them requires more than simply having a good idea—it requires understanding what type of intellectual property protection is available and how to obtain it.
Carlin Law assists inventors, entrepreneurs, and businesses with patents, trademarks, and related intellectual property matters.
Attorney Brandon Carlin is a registered patent attorney with an engineering background. Before practicing law, he worked as an engineer for Harley-Davidson in Milwaukee. That combination of technical and legal experience allows us to work directly with inventors to understand both how an invention works and how it may be protected.
Patents
A patent can provide an inventor with the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing a patented invention in the United States.
Obtaining a patent, however, involves much more than submitting a description of an invention to the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO"). Patent applications must satisfy detailed legal and technical requirements, and the claims contained in the application ultimately define the scope of the patent protection.
The USPTO itself notes that preparing and prosecuting a patent application requires knowledge of patent law, procedures, and relevant scientific or technical subject matter. Only practitioners authorized by the USPTO may represent others in patent matters before the agency.
We assist inventors with matters including:
- Evaluating inventions and potential patent protection
- Patent searches and prior-art considerations
- Provisional patent applications
- Nonprovisional utility patent applications
- Design patent applications
- Responding to Office Actions
- Patent prosecution
- Patent assignments
- Patent licensing and related agreements
From Invention to Patent
One of the most important times to speak with a patent attorney is before publicly disclosing, selling, or extensively marketing an invention.
When you meet with us, we want to understand not only what you have invented, but also how it works, what makes it different, who contributed to its development, and what you ultimately hope to do with it.
Some inventors intend to manufacture and sell their own products. Others want to license or sell their patent rights to an established company. Patents are property and may be assigned or licensed to others.
We can assist with the patent process as well as agreements involving the ownership, sale, assignment, or licensing of patent rights.
Trademarks
Trademarks protect brands rather than inventions.
A trademark may consist of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or combination of those elements that identifies the source of particular goods or services. Although the term “service mark” is sometimes used for marks associated with services, the term “trademark” is commonly used to refer to both.
For a business, a trademark may protect something as important as its:
- Business or brand name
- Product name
- Logo
- Slogan or other source identifier
Federal trademark registration can provide significant benefits, including nationwide rights associated with the registration, public notice through the federal trademark database, and a legal presumption concerning ownership and the right to use the registered mark for the listed goods or services.
Trademark Registration
Choosing a business name and registering an LLC does not necessarily provide the same protection as obtaining federal trademark registration.
Before filing an application, we can help evaluate the proposed mark, identify potential conflicts, determine the appropriate goods or services, and prepare the federal trademark application.
We can assist with:
- Trademark searches and clearance
- Federal trademark applications
- USPTO Office Actions
- Trademark assignments
- Trademark licensing
- Registration maintenance matters
The USPTO examination process can raise issues that are not obvious when an application is initially filed, which is one reason careful preparation at the beginning can be valuable.
Patent or Trademark?
Patents and trademarks protect different things.
If you develop a new product, for example, a patent may protect the invention or functional aspects of the product, while a trademark may protect the name or brand under which you sell it. Depending on the circumstances, a business may use multiple forms of intellectual property protection for the same product.
We can help determine what type of protection is appropriate for what you have created.
Protecting What You've Created
Whether you have developed a new invention or are building a brand, we can help you evaluate the available intellectual property protections and navigate the registration or patent process.
Contact Carlin Law to schedule an intellectual property consultation.
