United States Patent and Trademark Office

The United States Patent and Trademark Office oversees the two main ways federal law protects new ideas and brand identities: patents, which cover inventions, and trademarks, which cover the names, logos, and symbols businesses use to identify their goods and services. It reviews applications, decides whether they meet legal standards, and issues the rights that let inventors and businesses stop others from copying their work. Nearly every product or brand a person encounters has passed through some version of this process.

Patents grant inventors the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited time, in exchange for publicly disclosing how it works. Getting one involves drafting careful legal claims, searching existing inventions to confirm an idea is truly new, and working through a review process handled by America’s Patent Examiners. Along the way, applicants face real choices about strategy, cost, and timing, covered in guides on the provisional patent application, how long it takes to get a patent, and the cost of getting a patent.

Trademarks protect the words, symbols, and designs that let customers tell one company’s products apart from another’s. The office reviews applications to make sure a mark is distinctive and doesn’t conflict with one already in use, a process laid out in the step-by-step guide to applying for a U.S. trademark. Understanding the different categories of marks and what the familiar ™ and ® symbols actually mean helps explain why some protections require registration and others don’t.

Search and prior art matter before anyone files anything. Because a patent can only be granted for something genuinely new, inventors and businesses often research existing inventions first, a step explained in guides on searching for patents and navigating prior art.