Q: I want to some information regarding trademarks patent copyright intellectual property details provided below
This is the company website thefreeride.com , they are giving free shuttle transport , now I want to start this type of service in other country can I do that , I will not use their name , symbol, logo, app , website content or anything related to their website or logo , I will start a new company that also provide this type of service, now they questions is can use this type of service, whether I am breaking any law regarding patent copyright intellectual property trademarks etc , whether they can sue me (if I am using my own name , content etc) I am just using the idea
A:
In order to give you a full answer, you are going to have to hire an intellectual property attorney. But in a nutshell, you may be able to do that.
A business can protect its inventions by patents, its original works under copyright laws, its expression of its products by trademark. However, a business cannot protect its ideas. Ideas by themselves are not protectable.
So if you see a competitor identify a problem that the competitor solves and makes lots of money, there is not much that the competitor can do from stopping you from solving the same problem. The competitor may certainly prevent you from using their logos, brands, symbols, etc., or the competitor may obtain a patent on the technology used to solve the problem, but the competitor cannot prevent you from solving the problem in your own way.
And of course, there is always the possibility that the competitor never bothered to get a patent in the country where you are running your business.
Good luck!
A:
On the patent piece of this puzzle, -- one prudent step is to see if the company that owns thefreeride.com owns any patents and then look closely at those patents.
The place to look is the USPTO database for assignments. The owner of thefreeride.com would be the assignee. They may just be licensing patent rights and if the rights are not exclusive, they may not have noted the assignment to this database.
So you may want to search using search skills from my slide set at http://bit.ly/Patent_Searching
Best bet is to engage a patent attorney to do the searching.
I hope this helps.
Kevin E Flynn
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