Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Patents, Trademarks, Trade Secrets, and Copyrights
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2007 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Back in February, my law & technology class hosted Mark Kesslen, an IP lawyer at Lowenstein Sandler. He gave a guest lecture on intellectual property. I'm enough of an IP obsessive that I transcribed my notes and gave them out to classmates. Since I'm prepping my notes from the Software Freedom Law Center summit, I realized that a crash course on the US quartet of IP categories would come in handy. So: Intellectual Property crash course: Patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and trademarks. Please let me know of horrible inaccuracies.