Licensing is a key business strategy. It’s a way to maximize the earnings from inventions and creative works, which are called intellectual property or “IP.”.

What is licensing?

Licensing is when you grant some rights to intellectucal property “IP” that you own. It is really a partnership of mutual cooperation between the licensor, who owns the IP, and the licensee, who is given the right to use it for certain purposes.

Question: What are royalties?

Discussing a trademark in general is often difficult. Why? It has to do with the fact that you can trademark many things that are unique and entirely different.

When a person thinks of a trademark, most picture a logo of some sort. The swooping Coca Cola brand name is the classic example. Another example is the big red “O” you see in the television commercials for Overstock.com. Such examples of trademarks are fairly standard and most people can understand them without much effort.

In a rather stunning move, Google recently purchased the popular video site YouTube The question many are asking is how Google will deal with the potential copyright violations on the site?

To show you how much the Internet has changed in a relatively short amount of time, it is important to look back at the last big public medium that had copyright issues. In this case, we are talking about Napster. As you know, Napster was a system where music could be traded by people for free. This, of course, drove the record labels and artists crazy. If people were trading the music for free, royalties and revenues were not being produced. To quell the uprising, the music industry went after Napster and even individual users, claiming that the copyright for the musical pieces was being violated. As you also know, the record companies won the fight.

Once you start conducting business, you are going to start running into the topic of intellectual property and trademarks. Understanding the role of a trademark will help you grasp why they are important.

A trademark is a unique form of intellectual property. Most intellectual property is created to protect the person or business creating it. A patent, for example, is designed to protect the inventor from having other parties use it without consent. Copyright works much the same way. A person who writes a hit song should receive compensation from it and copyright is designed to protect the person in this regard.

I recall very vividly, a scene from a 1970’s comedy where the hapless hero of the piece, accidentally gets engaged to a young lady and spends the whole program plotting hilarious ways to escape from this engagement. At the conclusion of the vignette the chap breaks off the engagement, receives a sound slap from the distraught lady and is promptly told that she will sue him for breach of promise.

1. What is a Trademark?
A trademark can be any word, slogan, design, symbol, or even a color, smell, product configuration or a combination of these, used to identify the source of origin of particular goods and services. The trademark serves as a source identifier of your goods and services, to distinguish it from the goods and services of others. For example, Nike has a registered trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”). Their mark is used to distinguish their goods and services over other shoe companies. Nike actually owns several trademarks, including design marks as well, such as their swoosh symbol.

Well, many of us have heard of the term “Google Slap.” That is when Google is the slapper. But now Google is the one that has been slapped.

Google, the Californian company that runs the world’s most popular search engine, lost a court case in Brussels Belgium on 13 February 2007 where it was found that Google had breached copyright.

Copiepresse, a copyright protection specialist, was representing a group of 18 mostly French language newspapers who complained that Google was using “cached” links to offer free access to archived articles from the papers that were sold on a subscription basis.

Spam is flooding of the Internet with unsolicited bulk messages. It is illegal and unauthorized. It is abuse of the electronic messaging system. The most widely discussed spam is e-mail spam. Other forms of spam have also been reported like the spam in blogs and spam in mobile phone messaging. Stealing Internet mailing list and searching the web for addresses and using that information for spamming is also very common.

If you live in the state of Michigan, there is a law that protects the consumer that you may not be aware of; not too many people are, so I would like to share it with everyone so that as a consumer, you can protect yourself. It’s called the scanner law.

If you purchase an item that is marked with a price tag, and then at the checkout you are overcharged for the item, you are entitled to the difference that you were overcharged plus 10 times the difference up to $5.00 which is usually referred to as the ‘bonus’.

When a professional does something improper, immoral or illegal while performing his duties either intentionally or because of carelessness or ignorance, he is said to have committed a malpractice. The professional here fails to follow generally accepted standards and guidelines causing damage to the client or person using his services. The most talked about malpractices are medical practices (applicable to physicians, surgeons, dentists) and legal malpractices (applicable to lawyers). Though, legal suits for malpractices against accountants (in the case of Arthur Andersen) and investment advisers (in the case of Merrill Lynch) have also been reported.