I was talking to a Gene Simmons fan today. He claims that Gene Simmons has a patent for the term O.J., as in orange juice. My first thought was that he must mean copyright. Anyway, the issue raises three questions in my mind:
I searched about on the web, but can’t find anything substantial.
The only kind of intellectual property that is likely in a two letter abbreviation is a trade mark. So, is Gene Simmons in the business of selling something under the name “O.J.”?
I vaguely recall that Pat Reilly trademarked the term “threepeat” (when he was coaching the Lakers, maybe?). Became an issue here in Chicago with the Bulls threepeated twice. The word couldn’t be printed on t-shirts, etc., without paying for the privilege.
So, a trademark or a copyright are possible. How can a person find out it something is already trademarked?
Patents are strictly for useful items, such as inventions and business methods. There is no “utility” in a word or phrase, so the short answer is, no, words and phrases cannot be patented. That is not to say that words and phrases cannot be otherwise protected by intellectual property laws, only that patent isn’t the way it’s done.
One can search the database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, that’s how! Go to Trademarks on the left and you’ll find the link to search their records.
You can trademark (or service mark, which is essentially the same thing for a short phrase) whatever you like. To find out what’s currently under trademark, you can search the trademark database at http://www.uspto.gov/
Copyright – no. That would only apply to a longer work. Forrest J. Ackerman had a copyrighted story consisting of one letter (and a title, which isn’t copyrightable), but he cannot hold copyright to that letter.
OK. I checked that out and found this. If I’m reading it correctly, Dawn Food Products owns the trademark for O.J. Is that right?
Yes, they have it to sell “CAKE DONUT MIXES AND DONUTS”. There are 5 others who own “OJ” as a trade mark: the oldest is by Johnson Propeller Co., Inc., to sell “marine propellers, as structural parts of boats”.
Note that trade marks are tied to kinds of products, and often tied to partticular geographical areas. That’s how “Apple” can be a trademark both for a computer company and for a recorded music publisher.
If there was such a thing as an invented phrase that had actual, direct utility (let’s say, an actual working magic spell to make things levitate), would it be patentable?
I suspect that case law is scarce on that particular point.
Yes, it probably would. But you would definitely have to come in with a working model, as it would fall within the group of “this is so implausible we make you come in and demonstrate that it works” inventions, like perpetual motion machines.
And to be exact, what you would patent would not be the word itself, but the method of making things levitate by uttering the word (since words do not fall into any of the statutory classes of patentable subject matter).
Computer code is just words that make computers do stuff and you can apply for business patents for them.
Thanks. I’ll get right to work…
I believe (please correct me if I’m wrong) that you patent the concepts and ideas behind the code, not the code itself. Maybe code would be protected under copyright laws.
You patent the computer running the code, usually, as well as a method of doing whatever by executing computer instructions.
This is not quite an accurate statement.
To the extent that any given computer code exists, it is subject to copyright laws. No one can copy the work (the actual code) without the author’s sayso.
To the extent that the code represents a new idea (say, for example, a new computer programming language), it can be patented. It isn’t the code that is patented, but the idea.
Computer code normally is protected under copyright laws, being considered a “creative work”, just like a poem or a painting. However, computer code is one of the oddball situations where something can appear to be covered by two different kinds of intellectual property law. For example, Amazon’s “One-Click” ordering system was patented as a business method, but the code that actually makes the method possible is covered by copyright. But, it’s important to note that what is patented is not the code, but the business method. Once again, words aren’t patentable.
The patents I have on what is basically computer code are written up as patents on processes that are implemented - incidentally - on a computer. I susepect that someone implementing the process by paper and pencil would still be violating the patent. Yes, it is an idea as opposed to the expression of the idea in code, but certainly not all ideas can be patented, right?