Copyright, Trademark and Counterfeit Product Investigations

Your Louisiana Copyright, Trademark and Copyright Private Investigator understands that the misuse of your copyrights, trademarks and counterfeit products are civil wrongs. At Trinity Investigations, we can help you to uncover the misuse of these intellectual properties. Our investigation will be conducted in a manner that will preserve the evidence for court. Investigation into these matters has sadly become more of a duty of the manufacturer due to public perception. As a private investigator, we use covert surveillance and other methods to document your case. We also conduct our investigations wherever they take us to help identify warehouses, street vendors, suppliers and to find your counterfeit products.

Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Although there may be some similarities among these kinds of intellectual property protection, they are different and serve different purposes. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website, here are the definitions for patents, trademarks, servicemarks and copyrights.

What Is a Patent?

A patent for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Generally, the term of a new patent is 20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed in the United States or, in special cases, from the date an earlier related application was filed, subject to the payment of maintenance fees. U.S. patent grants are effective only within the United States, U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions. Under certain circumstances, patent term extensions or adjustments may be available.

• The right conferred by the patent grant is, in the language of the statute and of the grant itself,
• the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling
• the invention in the United States or
• importing
• the invention into the United States. What is granted is not the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import, but the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention. Once a patent is issued, the patentee must enforce the patent without aid of the USPTO.

There are three types of patents:

1) Utility patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof;

2) Design patents may be granted to anyone who invents a new, original, and ornamental design for an article of manufacture; and

3) Plant patents may be granted to anyone who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant.

What Is a Trademark or Servicemark?

A trademark is a word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others. A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies and distinguishes the source of a service rather than a product. The terms trademark and mark are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

Trademark rights may be used to prevent others from using a confusingly similar mark, but not to prevent others from making the same goods or from selling the same goods or services under a clearly different mark. Trademarks which are used in interstate or foreign commerce may be registered with the USPTO.

The registration procedure for trademarks and general information concerning trademarks is described on a separate page entitled Basic Facts about Trademarks

 (http://web.archive.org/web/20061122135606/http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/tac/doc/basic/)