Intellectual Property and Technology
What this domain tests
Intellectual Property and Technology tests the four IP regimes, their duration and infringement standards, and digital-era issues such as fair use and data protection.
Core rules and concepts
- Patents: Utility patents protect processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions; require novelty, utility, and nonobviousness; 20 years from filing. Design patents last 15 years. Public sale or use more than one year before filing bars a U.S. patent (on-sale bar).
- Copyright: Protects original expression fixed in a tangible medium; not ideas, facts, or functional elements. Duration: life plus 70 years for individuals; 95 years from publication for works made for hire. Infringement requires copying plus improper appropriation. Fair use factors: purpose, nature, amount, market effect.
- Trademarks: Protect source identifiers. Distinctiveness spectrum: generic (no protection), descriptive (secondary meaning), suggestive, arbitrary, fanciful. Infringement: likelihood of confusion; dilution for famous marks.
- Trade secrets: Protect confidential business information with reasonable secrecy and economic value; the DTSA provides federal civil remedies.
- Technology: CFAA addresses unauthorized computer access; state breach-notification laws and privacy statutes impose data-security duties.
Worked example
A professor scans a chapter and posts it on a course site. Factor one favors education but not commercial use; factor two favors factual material; factor three weighs against copying the whole chapter; factor four harms the publisher's licensing market. A court likely finds no fair use for the full chapter, though a short excerpt might qualify. The analysis is holistic, not a checklist.
Traps that cost marks
- Saying copyright protects ideas or facts.
- Applying trademark law to functional product features; that is patent or trade dress.
- Missing the one-year statutory bar for patents.
- Treating fair use as a fixed percentage; the four factors control.