PROTECTING YOUR CUSTOM COMPANY LOGO DESIGN'S COPYRIGHT

You would never want to lose your business to someone else, who has conveniently copied the logo to use it as their own. In order to safeguard your logo from plagiarism trademark infringement is one of the most important steps to protect your identity. People often confuse the protection of copyright and trademark for the same thing. Although both are used to protect the brand identity, but copyright protection is for logo and trademark is used to defend the logo, brand name or slogan as used in the market.
This article will elaborate some points on protecting your client’s Company Logo Design copyright. To protect your logo, you need to know about how to protect it?
Under U.S. Copyright Office "protection of copyright may be available for logo artwork that contains sufficient authorship." This means that the below mentioned types of logos can not be protected by copyright:
• Commonly used as symbols or patterns such as Latin crosses, peace signs or arrows
• Logos, which contains texts that have only simple choices in fonts, letters, colors for the sample text in Times New Roman or red text.
The term "sufficient authorship" means that the logo must have a certain degree of creativity and innovation associated with it. If your business uses a logo chosen from a free online source or MS Word clip art library, your logo is not eligible for copyright protection.
These are the steps you must follow to ensure the protection of copyright for your logo:
Correctly mark your work as Copyright: In order to avoid the mistake of other ignorant to affix the logo is protected by copyright. This is to warn people about the consequences of intentional copying.
Register your company logo: Register your company logo, Stationary Design or any other art or advertising that you want to protect against violation of its copyright. Registration can be done even before the launch of the company. This process is very simple and involves completing some forms.
Backup your request with sufficient evidence: The application for registration of copyright for your company logo should be kept as evidence that encloses information about how the work progressed to design the logo? Who was the author of the work? What's in the logo that makes it unique?
In case of joint ventures: If your company is a joint venture, agree in advance who will inherit the logo if a partner leaves the company.