What legal rights apply to your creative work?

If you are concerned with a creation of your own, you’ll first need to know what
form (or forms) of intellectual property applies to it in order to get to the right part
of this book. These basic rules should point you in the right direction:

• Trade secrets consist of designs, devices, processes, compositions, techniques,
formulas, information, or recipes that are kept secret by their owner
and which give their owner a competitive business advantage.
• Copyrights protect original and tangible forms of expressing creative ideas,
but not the ideas themselves. A creative nonfunctional design may be
copyrightable.
• Utility patents apply to new processes, machines, manufactures, or compositions
of matter, or new uses of any of the above if they are novel,
nonobvious, and useful.
• Design patents apply to nonfunctional, ornamental, or aesthetic design elements
of an invention or product.
• Plant patents may be issued for any asexually or sexually reproducible
plants (such as flowers) that are both novel and unobvious.
• Trademarks apply to marketing devices: the name of a product or service
or the symbols, logos, shapes, designs, sounds, or smells used to identify it.
They must be distinctive or have become well known through long use or
advertising.
• Unfair competition is a legal theory that extends protection to certain kinds
of intellectual property when trademark, copyright, and patent law don’t
apply. It applies when one business represents its products or services in a
way that confuses customers and stops them from buying from another
business.