Lecture 8 - Introduction to Intellectual Property Lecture Notes

A set of vocabulary flashcards covering the core concepts of Real and Intellectual Property law, including trademarks, patents, copyrights, and trade secrets based on the lecture transcript.

Real Property

Refers to land, buildings, and tangible items that can be physically held, such as a laptop.

Intellectual Property (IP)

Intangible things created by mental or creative processes, such as the design of a logo or a vaccine formula.

Trademarks

Distinctive marks, words, designs, pictures, or arrangements used by a producer to allow consumers to identify and link the product with the producer as a source indicator.

Trade Names

The names that companies use when doing business with the world, distinct from trademarks.

Goodwill

An intangible concept representing the benefit and advantage a company gains from its brand value and the trust consumers have built in it over time.

Lanham Act

A federal law enacted in $1946$ that protects businesses holding trademarks from competing businesses using confusingly similar names.

Arbitrary and Fanciful Trademarks

The strongest category of trademarks, consisting of invented words like Xerox or Kodak that have no inherent connection to the product.

Suggestive Trademarks

Marks that hint at or link to the nature and quality of a product, such as Netflix or Dairy Queen.

Descriptive Trademarks

Marks that are generally not protected unless the plaintiff can show the term has acquired customer recognition, such as American Airlines.

Trade Dress

The overall appearance and "total image" of a product, which can include nonfunctional features like color, texture, shape, and size.

Functionality Doctrine

A rule stating that trade dress must be nonfunctional to be protected; if an element is functional, it must be protected under patent law.

Trade Secrets

A process, formula, method of operation, or compilation of information used in business that is kept secret to provide a competitive advantage.

Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (EEA)

A federal law that allows the U.S. Attorney General to prosecute the intentional theft or misappropriation of trade secrets with penalties up to $5$ million for corporations.

Patents

Legal protections for novel, useful, and non-obvious products, machines, or processes, typically valid for $20$ years from the date of application.

Copyrights

The exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, and sell a fixed form of expression of an original creative idea, lasting for the creator's life plus $70$ years.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1988)

An act providing protections for owners of digital copyrights and establishing civil and criminal sanctions for circumventing anti-piracy encryption.

Fair Use Doctrine

A legal principle allowing portions of copyrighted work to be reproduced for specific purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.