A trademark is a legal concept that protects words, names, symbols, logos, and devices used in connection with goods or services to indicate the source of those goods and services (e.g. Nike checkmark for shoes, Coca-Cola mark for soda, Guinness mark for beer, Time Warner mark for cable, etc.).

In short, a trademark is a source identifier. This means a trademark is a "mark" used for consumers so they can easily identify and differentiate between different products and services in the marketplace.

A trademark and a service mark are identical – except that a trademark identifies a product while a service mark identifies a service.

The term "trademark" is often used by the public to refer to both trademarks and service marks (as indicated in the answer to Question 1). However, technically speaking, the term "trademark" means words, names, symbols, logos, and devices used in connection with goods to indicate the source of those goods. While a "service mark" means words, names, symbols, logos, and devices used in connection with services to indicate the source of those services.

All the other processes of creating, maintaining, and using a trademark or service mark is nearly identical. As such, we will use the term "trademark" in the sense that it applies to both trademarks and service marks (unless it just applies to service marks, in which we will highlight this distinction).

You’ll need to know the definitions of a trademark, copyright, and patent. See Question 1 for the definition of a trademark.

A copyright is a legal concept that protects works of authorship (e.g. such as short stories, books, music, plays, choreographies, architectures, movies, etc.) that are fixed in some kind of tangible medium of expression (e.g. on paper, on a recording device, in any kind of fixed material). But a copyright does not protect the actual ideas, procedures, processes, systems, or discoveries in the copyright. For example, if you write a song about love, you cannot copyright the idea of love. Rather, you can only copyright your expression of love in the song.

A patent is a legal concept that grants protections to individuals who create a new invention. Technically speaking, a government grants a patent to the individual holder of the patent with the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention for a certain amount of time. In contrast to trademarks and copyrights, patents can only be obtained from the government – while trademarks and copyrights are created by common law (i.e. the use/creation of the trademark or copyright by the individual). Patents also come in three forms including (i) utility patents, (ii) design patents, and (iii) plant patents.

Trademarks, copyrights, and patents all have unique rules that govern their creation and use.

Next, we’ll go over trademark questions 4 – 6.