Founders track financial health like cap tables, burn rate, and runway with real precision. Intellectual property gets far less attention, and it usually falls into one of two buckets: it’s either called “copyright” as a catch-all for all IP rights, or it’s not thought about at all until a dispute or a diligence request forces the question. Neither serves the business well. There are four distinct types of IP protection, each doing a different job, and most businesses have all four sitting somewhere in the business right now.
Trademark: your brand, and how customers recognize you
A trademark protects the words, logos, and other identifiers that tell a customer they’re buying from you and not a competitor. Your company name, your product name, your logo, in some cases a tagline or even a distinctive sound or color, all fall under trademark. It’s fundamentally about source identification: does the mark tell the buyer who they’re dealing with? In the US, it is a use it or lose it right. Talk to you trademark professional about use requirements.
What it doesn’t cover: the content on your website, the invention your product relies on, or the process you use to make it.
Copyright: the content you actually create
Copyright protects original works of authorship the moment they’re fixed in a tangible form: your website copy, your product photography, your marketing videos, the code your engineers write. You don’t need to register anything for copyright to exist, though registration gives you meaningfully stronger enforcement tools if someone infringes.
The common mix-up: founders assume a trademark registration also protects their marketing content. It doesn’t. Someone can copy your ad copy word for word without infringing your trademark at all, though they could be infringing your copyright.
Patent: the invention itself
A patent protects a specific technical solution: a novel process, a mechanism, a formulation, an invention that solves a problem in a way nobody has claimed before. Unlike trademark and copyright, patent protection requires an application, an examination process, and a genuinely novel and non-obvious invention. It can also be the shortest-lived of the four, typically twenty years from filing, after which the invention becomes public.
Most software-first companies don’t have much here. Most hardware, biotech, and manufacturing companies have quite a lot, whether they’ve realized it or not.
Trade secret: what you keep confidential instead of disclosing
A trade secret protects a formula, process, method, or piece of business information that has value specifically because it’s not publicly known, and that you’ve taken reasonable steps to keep confidential. The classic example is a recipe or manufacturing process a company might not patent, in part, because a patent would require disclosing it publicly in exchange for that twenty-year window.
Trade secret protection lasts as long as the secret stays a secret. It disappears the moment the information becomes public, whether through a leak, reverse engineering, or a former employee walking out the door with it.
Where founders mix these up
The most common mistake we see is treating “we got the domain name” as a complete IP strategy. A registered trademark protects your name and logo. It says nothing about who owns the code your contractor wrote, whether your product photography is actually yours to use, or whether the manufacturing process your team developed is protected at all.
The second most common mistake: assuming these protections are mutually exclusive. They’re not. A single product can carry a trademark on its name, a copyright on its packaging design, a patent on its mechanism, and a trade secret on the manufacturing process behind it, all at once, all doing different work.
Getting the map right early means every future filing decision, and every future diligence conversation, gets faster and cleaner.
Not sure which protection your brand needs? Markery Law can map it for you.
By Jackie Patt, Principal, Markery Law