Trademarks and Avoiding Consumer Confusion: Crash Course Intellectual Property #5

In which Stan Muller teaches you about our third branch of Intellectual Property, trademarks. A lot of people confuse trademark and copyright. Trademarks apply to things like company and product names and logos, packaging designs, and commercial designs. Basically, copyright protects ideas, but trademarks protect the things that help consumers tell companies apart. This ensures that consumers know the source of the goods they’re buying. Without trademarks, it would be really difficult to buy the same product twice, and very easy for unscrupulous companies to pass off fakes and knock offs of the products you want. I’m telling you, you like trademarks.

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