Curtis Lamar Harrington Jr
Your HIGH TECH Patent Attorneys For Intellectual Property & Its Taxation
Patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets all represent NEGATIVE rights. The negative rights are the right to prevent others from doing something in the particular area. Patents give the holder the right to prevent others from making, using and selling the claimed invention. A copyright enables the holder to prevent others from making copies or performing the copyrighted work. A trademark enables the holder to prevent others from using the same or a similar trademark for identifying the goods and services of the holder. A trade secret gives the holder of the trade secret, who takes reasonable steps to protect the trade secret, the ability to prevent others who wrongfully obtain the secret from using it.
Remember that positive rights, such as the right to manufacture, the right to adopt a name, the right to copy a literary work and the right to use a trade secret are never absolute. Usually these rights can affirmatively exist only to the extent that the holder of one or more of the negative rights grants you "permission" with regard to their intellectual property protected item. There may still be a myriad of other rights holders waiting in the wings to assert their intellectual property rights with regard to the item being manufactured, etc. For example, two patents can properly cover the same item. In the usual case, the patents will be of different scope, but the manufacture of the item will still require a license from both patent holders.
Curtis L Harrington Jr
Harrington & Harrington
6300 E State University Dr #250
Long Beach CA 90815
Tel: 562 594-9784
Fax: 562 594-4414
E-mail: curt@patentax.com
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