Trademark vs. Patent vs. Copyright: What Each Protects, Costs and Lasts

Coca-Cola shows three kinds of intellectual property at work on one product: design patents and then trademarks on the bottle, a trademark on the name, and a trade secret for the formula.

• Design patents. The contour bottle got Design Patent No. 48,160 on November 16, 1915. Design patents cannot be renewed, and the last of the bottle's design patents expired by 1951.
• Trademarks. The bottle bearing the name COCA-COLA was registered as a trademark on April 12, 1960 (Reg. No. 696,147), and the bare bottle shape on February 1, 1977 (Reg. No. 1,057,884), once the public recognized the shape by itself. Both are still in force. The name itself has been registered since January 31, 1893 (Reg. No. 22,406) and has been renewed seven times.
• A trade secret. In 1985 a federal court called the complete formula "one of the best-kept trade secrets in the world," known to only two people inside the company.

The patents ran out. The trademarks are still being renewed. That difference is worth understanding before you decide what to file.

The short version

Fees are government fees only, not attorney fees, as of October 2026.

Trademark: your name, for your goods

A trademark protects whatever tells buyers who is behind a product or service: a name, a logo, a slogan, even a shape, as the Coca-Cola bottle shows. It does not make you the owner of a word. The USPTO calls that "a common misconception": "you don't have rights to the word or phrase in general, only to how that word or phrase is used with your specific goods or services."

You start owning a trademark by using it, but those rights are local. Federal registration gives you nationwide rights and the ® symbol. It costs $350 per class of goods or services, plus surcharges for incomplete applications or custom descriptions, and the USPTO currently takes about 10 months from filing to a decision (current wait times). A registration can last indefinitely, but only if you keep using the mark and file the maintenance documents: $325 per class between the fifth and sixth year after registration, then $650 per class between the ninth and tenth year and every ten years after that. Three years of nonuse is presumed to be abandonment.

Before you file, a knockout search shows whether someone has already registered or applied for a similar mark for related goods. Our step-by-step guide covers how to trademark a name.

Patent: your invention, for 20 years

A utility patent covers "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter," and gives you the right to stop others from making, using or selling it. A design patent covers "any new, original and ornamental design for an article of manufacture," meaning how a product looks, not how it works.

Three facts change how founders should think about patents:

• The clock starts at filing, not grant. A utility patent ends "20 years from the date on which the application for the patent was filed." The average application now takes 29 months, and examination time generally comes out of the 20 years, although the law adds time back when the USPTO itself misses certain deadlines (patent term adjustment). The patent also lapses early unless you pay maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years.
• Ideas are not patentable. The Supreme Court has held that "abstract ideas are not patentable," and that "the mere recitation of a generic computer cannot transform a patent-ineligible abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention" (Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, 2014). An abstract algorithm does not become patentable just because it runs on a computer.
• Design patents expire. A design patent lasts 15 years from grant for applications filed since May 13, 2015 (14 years for older ones), with no renewals. That is why the Coca-Cola bottle moved from patent protection to trademark protection.

The patent deadline founders miss

In the United States, you have one year after your own public disclosure, such as a launch, a demo or a published paper, to file. A disclosure "made 1 year or less before the effective filing date" does not count against you (35 U.S.C. § 102(b)(1)). Many other countries are less forgiving. The USPTO itself warns that such a disclosure, "although protected in the United States, may preclude patenting in foreign countries," and Europe and China are among the strict ones. If you might want patents abroad, file before you announce.

A provisional application, $325 ($130 small entity, $65 micro), buys 12 months and the right to say "patent pending." It is never examined, cannot be extended, and does not become a patent unless you file a full application within the 12 months.

Copyright: your creative work, automatically

Copyright covers "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression," which includes writing, software code, images, music and video. It exists from the moment the work is created and, for an individual author, lasts for the author's life plus 70 years. Work a company owns as a work made for hire lasts 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever ends first.

Registration "is not a condition of copyright protection," but it matters when something goes wrong: you cannot sue over a U.S. work until it has been registered, or refused registration. Registration costs $45 online for one work by a single author who also owns it, not made for hire, and $65 for other online filings, which covers most company-owned work. On July 14, 2026, the Copyright Office sent Congress a proposed schedule that would raise those fees to $55 and $85, no earlier than mid-November 2026. A clean online claim currently takes about 3.4 months.

What copyright does not cover matters as much. "Words and short phrases, such as names, titles, and slogans, are uncopyrightable," the Copyright Office says. Your company name and tagline are trademark territory. Copyright also does not protect ideas, methods or systems, only the specific way you expressed them.

Trade secrets: the fourth option

Some things are better kept secret than disclosed in a patent, which becomes public and expires. Under federal law, a trade secret is business or technical information that is valuable because it is not generally known and not readily discoverable by proper means, and that its owner takes reasonable steps to keep secret (18 U.S.C. § 1839). There is nothing to file, and protection lasts as long as those conditions hold. If someone steals it, you can sue. But protection ends once the information becomes generally known, and it does not stop someone who works it out independently or by reverse engineering.

Common mistakes

• "I can copyright my business name." No. Names and slogans are not copyrightable; protect them with a trademark.
• "A patent protects my brand." No. A patent covers an invention or a design. A competitor can sell a different product under a lookalike name, and only a trademark stops that.
• "Copyright doesn't exist until I register." It exists from creation, but you need registration before you can sue over a U.S. work.
• "Mailing it to myself protects it." The Copyright Office: "There is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration."
• "A patent lasts 20 years from grant." It lasts 20 years from filing.
• "I filed, so I can use ®." Not until the USPTO registers the mark. Until then, use ™ or ℠ (which symbol to use).

Which one do you need?

Most startups need a trademark first, because the name is what customers and competitors see on day one and the rights take months to secure. Add a patent if you have a genuinely new invention or design and plan to file before you announce it. Original code and content your team creates has copyright from the moment it is created, but make sure contractors assign their work to you in writing, because without that the contractor may own it. Register the works you would need to enforce. Keep anything that would lose its value if published, a recipe, a process, a dataset, as a trade secret.

Sources

• 15 U.S.C. § 1127; 35 U.S.C. §§ 101, 102(b)(1), 154(a)(2), 171, 173; 17 U.S.C. §§ 102, 302, 408(a), 411(a) (govinfo.gov, 2024 edition)
• USPTO, "What is a trademark?": https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/what-trademark
• USPTO trademark fee schedule (37 C.F.R. § 2.6) and patent fee schedule: https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-payment/uspto-fee-schedule
• USPTO, provisional application basics: https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/apply/provisional-application
• USPTO trademark processing times (October 1, 2026): https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/application-timeline and the USPTO Patents Data Visualization Center: https://www.uspto.gov/dashboard/patents/
• U.S. Copyright Office: fees (https://www.copyright.gov/about/fees.html), proposed fee schedule submitted to Congress July 14, 2026 (https://www.copyright.gov/rulemaking/feestudy2026/proposed-fee-schedule.pdf), processing times (https://www.copyright.gov/registration/docs/processing-times-faqs.pdf), Circular 33 (https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf) and copyright basics FAQ
• Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International (U.S. June 19, 2014): https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-298
• Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Shreveport, Inc. v. Coca-Cola Co., 107 F.R.D. 288 (D. Del. 1985): https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/9027743/coca-cola-bottling-co-of-shreveport-inc-v-coca-cola-co/
• U.S. Design Patents D48,160 (1915), D63,657 (1923) and D105,529 (1937); USPTO register records for Reg. Nos. 22,406 (serial 70022406), 696,147 (serial 72069873) and 1,057,884 (serial 73088384)
• Defend Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1836 and 1839
• European Patent Convention, Articles 54 and 55: https://www.epo.org/en/legal/epc/2020/a54.html and https://www.epo.org/en/legal/epc/2020/a55.html; WIPO, "Certain Aspects of National/Regional Patent Laws: Grace Period" (August 2024): https://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/scp/en/national_laws/grace_period.pdf