Guide
Copyright vs trademark: which one covers what got copied
Written September 1, 2026 by Josh Pigford
Copyright covers the things you made. Trademark covers the identifiers that tell a buyer the goods are yours. Photographs and product descriptions are copyright. A logo is too, when the design is creative enough. Your name, your logo and your tagline are trademark. The shape of the product is a patent or trade dress question. For a product seller, most copying is a copyright problem, and copyright is the one right you already own without filing anything.
That is the whole answer. The rest of this page is what each right costs, what a registration buys that ownership alone does not, which marketplace form accepts which claim, and what happens when you send the wrong kind of notice.
The short version
- Copyright exists the moment the work is fixed. Trademark rights start with use in commerce. Patents exist only when the government grants one.
- Names, titles and slogans are outside copyright entirely. 37 CFR 202.1 says so by name.
- A stolen photograph is a copyright claim on every platform, and it needs no registration.
- A copied name or logo is a trademark report, and most platform forms want a registration number before they will act.
- Registration costs $45 to $65 for a copyright and $350 per class for a trademark application as of September 2026. A trademark takes about 9.8 months across all filings, a copyright about 4.1.
- Of the intellectual property reports Etsy processed in 2025, 64% were copyright and 33% were trademark, in Etsy's own categories.
The one-paragraph answer
Copyright is the right in an original work fixed in a tangible form: a photograph, a piece of writing, a drawing. It arises automatically at the moment of fixation, and it never covers an idea, a name or a short phrase.
Trademark is the right in a word, name, symbol or device used in commerce to identify goods and point at their source. It arises from use rather than creation, it is tied to the goods it is used on, and it lasts as long as the use continues.
A patent is a grant from the government over an invention or, for a design patent, over the ornamental appearance of an article. It exists only after examination, never automatically.
Trade dress is the trademark family's answer to appearance: the look of packaging, or the design of a product, protected only where buyers read that look as pointing at one source.
The USPTO splits the same territory in one line each. A trademark is "A word, phrase, design, or a combination that identifies your goods or services". A copyright covers "Artistic, literary, or intellectually created works, such as ... photographs". A patent covers "Technical inventions ... or machine designs". Those sentences stop exactly where a seller's real question starts, which is not what a trademark is but which right covers the thing that got taken.
So work from the asset. Somebody lifted your listing gallery: copyright. Somebody opened a store under a misspelling of your brand: trademark. Somebody made a physical article with your product's silhouette: trade dress or a design patent, and the hardest of the three to act on. One copied storefront triggers all three at once, and you still pick one at a time, because every platform form does.
What each right protects, asset by asset
Eight things a product business owns, four rights, and the section of law each answer rests on. Read your own case off the row rather than off the definition.
| Asset | Copyright | Trademark | Trade dress | Patent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product photos | Yes. A pictorial work under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 102(a)(5). | Rarely. Imagery functions as a mark only where buyers read it as identifying the source. | Rarely, and on that same condition. | No. |
| Product descriptions and page copy | Yes, where it carries original expression. 102(a) protects "original works of authorship". | No, beyond any mark named inside the text. | No. | No. |
| Brand name | No. 37 CFR 202.1(a) excludes names, titles and slogans. | Yes. A word used to identify and distinguish goods, 15 U.S.C. 1127. | No. | No. |
| Logo | Sometimes. Familiar symbols and simple combinations of them are uncopyrightable; a larger design with enough creative expression can be registered. | Yes. A symbol or device that indicates source, 15 U.S.C. 1127. | No. The logo is the mark itself. | No. |
| Slogan or tagline | No. 37 CFR 202.1(a) again, and Circular 33 lists mottos and slogans by name. | Yes, where buyers read it as identifying you. | No. | No. |
| Packaging and label layout | Sometimes. The artwork printed on it can be a pictorial work. The arrangement as an idea cannot. | Sometimes, where the get-up itself points at one source. | Sometimes. Packaging can be inherently distinctive, per Wal-Mart Stores v. Samara Bros., but it still has to be distinctive and non-functional. | No. |
| Product shape or ornamental design | Sometimes, and rarely. Only features separable from the useful article, per 17 U.S.C. 101 and Star Athletica. | No, not as a word or symbol mark. | Sometimes. Product design needs secondary meaning, and 15 U.S.C. 1125(a)(3) puts the non-functionality burden on you. | Sometimes. A design patent covers the ornamental appearance, if the design is new and you filed inside the one-year window. |
| How the product works | No. 102(b) excludes any procedure, process, system or method of operation. | No. | No. Functional features are outside trade dress. | Sometimes. A utility patent, if the invention is new and you filed in time. Otherwise, keep it secret. |
Filled. Covers the asset as a matter of course.
Filled, red. The same, on the two rows a copied listing loses first.
Half filled. Covers it only on conditions, listed in the table above.
Open. Does not cover the asset, beyond the rare cases the table names.
Rows run in the same order as the table above, where every asset carries its full name and every cell is written out in words with the section of law it rests on. United States law, read September 1, 2026.
Two things fall out of the grid. The copyright column covers what a listing actually loses: a copycat needs your photographs and your description to build a page, takes them first, and both were yours from the moment they existed. The trademark column is where the filing money goes, because the assets in it are the ones copyright is written to exclude.
The exclusion is deliberate. 37 CFR 202.1(a) refuses "Words and short phrases such as names, titles, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering or coloring", and the Copyright Office's Circular 33 explains why: they "contain an insufficient amount of authorship". The same circular points at the other door, noting that "Under certain circumstances, names, titles, or short phrases may be protectable under federal or state trademark laws."
One right is missing from the table because it works the other way around. A trade secret is defined in 18 U.S.C. 1839(3) as business, technical or economic information that the owner "has taken reasonable measures to keep ... secret" and that "derives independent economic value ... from not being generally known". Your supplier list, your formula, your process: those are trade secrets while nobody else has them, and the protection ends the day they get out. That is the fallback for the last row of the table, because a method you never patented and never published is still worth something as long as it stays inside the building.
How you get each right
The three systems do not begin at the same moment or for the same reason, and that is where most of the confusion starts.
- Copyright begins when the work is fixed. You take the photograph, and the right exists. Nothing is filed and nothing is paid. 17 U.S.C. 401(a) says a copyright notice "may be placed" on published copies, which is permissive rather than mandatory. There is one reason to use it anyway, and 401(d) is it: where a proper notice appears, "no weight shall be given to such a defendant's interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement".
- Trademark rights begin with use in commerce. Selling goods under a name creates rights in that market with no filing. The limit is geography, and the USPTO puts it plainly: "You may only be able to enforce those rights in the specific areas in the United States where you use the trademark if the use covers less than the entire country." Registration replaces that patchwork with nationwide reach, public notice of the claim, a legal presumption of ownership, a basis for filing abroad, the right to sue in federal court, and the ability to record the mark with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
- A trademark application comes in two flavors. A section 1(a) application is filed on use already happening and needs a specimen showing the mark on the goods. A section 1(b) application is filed on an intent to use, reserving a place in line before the product ships, and requires a statement of use later at $150, plus $125 for each extension. The class finder maps goods to Nice classes, and the cost calculator runs the ten-year figure.
- Copyright registration is optional, and it is not the right itself. The copyright already exists. Registering unlocks remedies, and the deadline attached to them is why it is done early rather than after a copy appears. Registering a catalog of product photographs is its own arithmetic, because the group program changes the cost by three orders of magnitude.
- A patent exists only when it is granted. There is no automatic version and no common-law version. Worse for most sellers, the door closes: 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(1) gives a one-year grace period from a public disclosure or a first sale, so a product on sale for more than a year cannot be patented at all. The two patent routes for a copied product covers what each one costs and how long each takes.
Unregistered trademark rights are real and enforceable. 15 U.S.C. 1125(a)(1)(A) creates a federal claim against a use likely to cause confusion "as to the affiliation, connection, or association" of one person with another, with no registration element in it. Registration changes the evidence you walk in with, and the doors that open, including most platform trademark forms.
Costs and timelines side by side
Government fees only. No attorney, no filing service, no search. Every figure is current as of September 2026. The copyright fees carry a caveat: the Copyright Office published a proposed increase on March 20, 2026, with comments closed on May 4, 2026, so read the schedule before you file.
| Right | To hold it | To register it | How long | Term and upkeep |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copyright | $0. It exists on fixation. | $45 single, $65 standard, $55 for a group of up to 750 photographs | 4.1 months average for claims closed October 2025 to March 2026 | Life of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years from publication and 120 from creation for a work made for hire. No renewals. |
| Trademark | $0 in the area where you use it. | $350 per class, base filing option | 4.2 months to first action and 9.77 months total across all filings, Q3 FY2026 | 10 years, renewable forever. Section 8 in the fifth to sixth year at $325, Section 8 and 9 every ten years at $325 each, six-month grace at $100 per section. |
| Trade dress, unregistered | $0, and you carry the burden of proving it is not functional. | Registrable as a mark where it is distinctive. | Same examination queue as any other mark. | Indefinite while the look stays in use and keeps pointing at you. |
| Design patent | Nothing exists until it is granted. | $520 micro entity, $1,040 small, $2,600 undiscounted, to grant | 21.3 months total pendency | 15 years from grant. No maintenance fees. |
| Utility patent | Nothing exists until it is granted. | $658 micro entity front end, about $3,552 micro entity across the full life | 29.3 months total pendency | 20 years from filing, with maintenance fees along the way. |
A trademark is the only one of these that keeps asking for money after you get it. Across ten years, one class costs roughly $1,325 in government fees: the $350 application, the $325 Section 8 declaration due in the fifth to sixth year, and the $325 Section 8 and $325 Section 9 pair at ten years. Miss a window and a six-month grace period costs $100 per section. Miss that and the registration is gone. Work out your own maintenance dates, because they run from the registration date rather than the filing date.
The other asymmetry: copyright is free because it is automatic, and a trademark is expensive because acquiring it is most of the work. Once it is registered, the number on the certificate unlocks the platform forms a copyright claim never needed.
What registration actually buys you
Both systems sell a registration, and the two products are not alike.
On the copyright side
17 U.S.C. 411(a) makes registration the gate to a federal lawsuit, and the Supreme Court closed the argument about when that gate opens in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, 586 U.S. 296 (2019): a claimant may commence suit when the Copyright Office registers the copyright, not when the application is mailed. Section 412 attaches a deadline to the money. Statutory damages and attorney's fees are off the table unless you registered before the copying began, or within three months of first publication. Section 504(c) is what sits behind that door: an award between $750 and $30,000 per work as the court considers just, with no proof of loss required, and a ceiling of $150,000 where the copying was willful.
What it does not buy is the ability to send a notice. That lever is open to everyone with an original work, today.
On the trademark side
15 U.S.C. 1115(a) makes the certificate "prima facie evidence of the validity of the registered mark ... and of the registrant's exclusive right to use", which shifts who has to prove what. After five years of continuous use a mark can become incontestable, and 1115(b) then treats the registration as "conclusive evidence" of the same things. Section 1111 attaches a consequence to the ® symbol: without notice of registration, "no profits and no damages shall be recovered ... unless the defendant had actual notice of the registration". The ™ symbol has no statutory basis at all, which is why anyone may use it on any mark, while ® is reserved for federally registered marks.
A famous mark gets one more tool. 15 U.S.C. 1125(c)(1) allows injunctive relief against dilution by blurring or by tarnishment, whether or not anyone is confused. Fame there means nationally recognized, so this is not the small brand's lane and it is worth knowing only so you do not plan around it.
Then there are the doors a number opens outside the courtroom. Recording the mark with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Most marketplace trademark reporting forms. And Amazon Brand Registry, which will take a registered or pending mark but nothing else, and requires the brand name in your listings to match the mark text exactly.
Getting there is the part to budget for. In the third quarter of fiscal year 2026 the USPTO approved 36.03% of base filing option applications on first action, so roughly 64% of those filings drew an office action from an examining attorney. A letter back and a deadline to answer it is the normal experience of filing a trademark.
Which form accepts which claim
The distinction becomes a form field here. Every marketplace sorts reports by claim type before a human reads one, and the sorting decides what you have to produce. The pattern is the same everywhere: a copyright claim asks who you are and where the original lives, and a trademark claim asks for a registration number.
A copyright notice has six required elements, listed at 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A). Every platform copyright form is these six fields with different labels.
- 1. A physical or electronic signature of someone authorized to act for the owner of the right.
- 2. Identification of the copyrighted work, or a representative list where several works at one site are covered.
- 3. Identification of the material complained of, with enough detail for the platform to find it.
- 4. Contact details: an address, a telephone number, and an email address if you have one.
- 5. A statement of your good faith belief that the use is not authorized.
- 6. A statement that the notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act for the owner.
A registration number is not on that list, which is the whole reason a stolen-photo claim is available to a brand that has filed nothing.
| Platform | Claim types it takes | Registration needed? | The thing that catches people |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon report form | Trademark, copyright, patent, design right, parallel import | Trademark claims need a federally registered mark. Pending applications and common-law rights are excluded. Copyright claims need nothing. | One intellectual property type per notice, only the first trademark number is considered, and 50 ASINs is the cap. |
| Shopify copyright form | Copyright only | None. | Per-page URLs. Shopify states that "A general shop link will not be accepted." You sign under penalty of perjury. |
| Shopify trademark form | Trademark and trade dress | Asks for a registration number and the countries it covers. | A trade dress claim also wants a description of the distinctive aspects, including size, shape, color and texture, and a statement that they are not functional. |
| Etsy reporting portal | Copyright, trademark, and patent through the help center | Trademark claims fail where the mark is dead or is only an application. | Only the owner or an authorized agent may report. Etsy rejected 18% of reports in 2025 where it could not verify authorization, the description was insufficient, or the report otherwise failed its requirements. |
| Instagram and Meta forms | Separate copyright, trademark and counterfeit forms | The copyright form asks for none. The trademark form asks for a registration number. | The copyright and trademark forms cap at 30 links each, one mark per trademark report, and the counterfeit form states that other claim types "will not be addressed through this form". |
| Walmart | Copyright, trademark, patent, publicity, counterfeit | Brand Portal requires a USPTO-registered mark. A public webform exists without one. | Walmart states it "does not mediate patent disputes" and will forward the claim to the third party. |
| eBay rights-owner reporting | Copyrights, trademarks, designs, patents, utility models | Rights owners enroll in the reporting portal first. | Design claims are framed around items "whose overall impression doesn't differ from the protected design". |
Read the middle column down and the rule falls out. A stolen photograph is a copyright notice on every platform in the table and needs no registration anywhere. A copied name or logo is a trademark report, and most of these forms want a number first. That is why a brand with no trademark is not powerless: the photographs are usually the stronger claim, because they are the thing that was literally taken.
If the copy is a whole cloned storefront, filing a Shopify takedown is the route, and the three Shopify report routes covers which of them fits what was taken. For a fake social account trading on your name, the Instagram report that actually removes a brand impersonator is a different form again.
What happens when you file the wrong claim type
Three failure modes, in rising order of cost.
- The form stops you. A brand with no registration reaches for the trademark route because "they copied my whole brand" feels like a trademark problem, and hits a required registration field. The fix is to look again at what was actually taken, because the photographs on that copied page are yours and the copyright route is open.
- The claim is accepted and then reversed. A copyright takedown starts a clock rather than ending a dispute. The seller can file a counter notice, and material that came down can go back up. Etsy reported that sellers filed counter notices for 10% of copyright reports in 2025, a 16% increase on the year before. A weak claim is more likely to draw one.
- The notice itself becomes the liability. 17 U.S.C. 512(f) creates liability for anyone who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing, and the damages run to the person wrongly targeted and to the service provider. Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 815 F.3d 1145 (9th Cir. 2016) added that a copyright holder must consider fair use in good faith before sending. Shopify puts the same point in plain words on its form, warning that a false or bad-faith report is punishable by law. You are signing under penalty of perjury, and the platform can forward your notice, contact details included, to the person you reported.
None of that is a reason to hesitate over a copy of your own photograph in somebody else's listing. It is a reason to name the right claim, describe the right asset, and send nothing you have not checked. The notice, field by field is what each line is for, and a cease and desist letter over a copied name is the parallel document on the trademark side.
Where the numbers point
Nothing below is our data. These are public agency and marketplace figures. They say one thing clearly: in the places where rights holders actually report copies, copyright is the busier lane.
Etsy publishes an annual transparency report with a figure it titles "Intellectual Property Takedowns, by IP issue". Across its last three reports, copyright was the larger share every year. In 2025 Etsy processed around 111,000 alleged infringement reports, of which 64% were copyright claims and 33% were trademark claims, in Etsy's own categories. In 2024 it processed 85,591 reports, split 59% copyright and 38% trademark. In 2023 it processed 122,927 reports, split 61% copyright and 37% trademark. Patent claims were 1% in 2023 and 0% in each of the two later reports.
61% / 37%
Copyright against trademark, 2023. 122,927 reports.
59% / 38%
Copyright against trademark, 2024. 85,591 reports.
64% / 33%
Copyright against trademark, 2025. Around 111,000 reports, in Etsy's wording.
Etsy transparency reports for 2023, 2024 and 2025, read September 1, 2026. Categories and figures are Etsy's own, from the table it heads TYPE and PERCENTAGE. Patent was 1% in 2023 and 0% in the two later reports, and Other was 2%, 3% and 3%, so the two bars shown cover 98% of reports in 2023 and 97% in each of 2024 and 2025. Copyright was the larger share in all three years and did not move in one direction across them.
The federal court docket points the same way. In the twelve months ending September 30, 2025, 7,933 copyright suits were filed in United States district courts against 4,217 trademark suits and 4,121 patent suits, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Copyright suits outnumbered trademark suits by about 1.9 to 1 that year, and grew 9.4% while trademark filings grew 25.4%.
Registration volumes show the opposite shape. The U.S. Copyright Office reported that it received 510,003 claims to copyright in fiscal year 2025 and registered 415,780, of which 79,712 were visual arts registrations, about 19.2% of the total. Inside that, the two group photograph programs accounted for 12,993 registrations of published photographs and 3,117 of unpublished ones. The USPTO received 824,192 trademark application classes for registration in fiscal year 2025, 57,054 more classes than the year before.
Far more trademark classes get filed each year than copyright claims, and yet copyright is what gets asserted, in the courts and on the marketplaces alike. A trademark has to be registered to be worth much, so the filing is the whole cost. A copyright is held by everyone who ever made anything and shows up in a statistic only when somebody asserts it.
How to read these, and how not to. The three-year comparison is Etsy's own category split for reports Etsy processed, and Etsy's seller mix skews handmade and print-on-demand, so its copyright share is not a share of the whole market. The court figures count suits filed rather than outcomes, and a filing count says nothing about who won.
Assets that carry two rights, and the ones that carry almost none
A logo is the both-rights case
A logo used on your goods is a trademark, because the Lanham Act defines a mark as any word, name, symbol, or device used to identify and distinguish goods and to indicate their source, and that is what a logo does for a living. Whether it is also a copyrighted work is a separate question, and the answer turns on how much authorship the drawing carries.
Circular 33 draws that line without ever using the word logo, in the familiar-symbols passage quoted above: a simple combination of familiar symbols is out, and a larger design with enough creative expression in it can be registered. A circle with your initials in it sits on the first side, a drawn emblem usually on the second, and a wordmark set in a font is out either way, because 37 CFR 202.1 excludes typeface as typeface.
The practical consequence: if a copycat lifts your logo file onto their store you may hold both claims, and while your mark is unregistered the copyright claim is the one a form will take today.
A product's shape is the hard case
Copyright mostly fails here, by design. 17 U.S.C. 101 defines a useful article as "an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information", and protects its design "only if, and only to the extent that, such design incorporates pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article". The Supreme Court restated that test in Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc. (U.S. 2017): a feature qualifies only if it can be perceived as a work of art separate from the useful article and would itself be protectable if imagined separately. A pattern printed on a bag can pass. The bag cannot.
Trade dress is the next attempt, and it is steep for product design. In Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Brothers, Inc. (U.S. 2000), the Court held that in a section 43(a) action for unregistered trade dress, "a product's design is distinctive, and therefore protectible, only upon a showing of secondary meaning". Packaging can be inherently distinctive; product design never is, and the Court told lower courts to "err on the side of caution and classify ambiguous trade dress as product design". On top of that, 15 U.S.C. 1125(a)(3) puts the burden on you: "the person who asserts trade dress protection has the burden of proving that the matter sought to be protected is not functional". Ten worked examples of what that standard protects covers which cases were won, which were lost, and on what.
Which leaves the design patent, the only right written for the appearance of a product. It runs $520 for a micro entity to grant, takes 21.3 months, and lasts 15 years with no maintenance fees. It also has a deadline that has already passed for most people reading this. 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(1) gives one year from the first public disclosure or sale. A product that has been selling for eighteen months is already outside that window.
Two things people believe that are not true
- "One asset, one right." A logo is routinely both a trademark and a copyrighted work. Packaging can be a copyrighted design, a registrable mark and trade dress at the same time. The rights stack, and which one you assert on a given day is a tactical choice about what the form in front of you will accept.
- "Mailing yourself a copy protects it." The Copyright Office answers this in its own FAQ: "There is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration." Your copyright already existed without the envelope, and the envelope buys none of what a registration buys.
Where Knockoff fits
Knockoff is what we build, so read this knowing that. We work the copyright side of the map above, because that is the side a product catalog lives on. Connect a Shopify store by domain alone and your product photos become the reference set. We watch for them across marketplaces and the open web, and a match counts only when your photograph appears in the seller's own listing gallery. Each confirmed match arrives as a case with the archived page, a timestamped screenshot, your original beside theirs and the notice already written for the route it belongs on. You approve it, a person here reads the notice, and you submit it through the platform's own form. See what a case holds before you approve it.
The limits, because they belong on a page like this one. Shopify stores only today, one store per company. Every filing is a customer-submitted package with a verified link to the platform's own portal, except on the fully managed plan, where Knockoff prepares, signs and files as your authorized agent on the platforms that accept agent filings. US trademark watch only. Detection of a copied product look is advisory and never becomes a filing on its own. Nobody here is a lawyer, we do not file copyright registrations or trademark applications, and nobody in this category controls what a platform decides, so read any promise of removals as a sales line. The plans are priced in the open, monthly, with no contract.
Questions
Is it better to have a copyright or a trademark? +
Neither is better. They cover different things, and most product brands hold both without choosing. Copyright covers the work you made: photographs, written descriptions, artwork. Trademark covers the identifiers that tell a buyer the goods are yours: the name, the logo, the tagline. If a seller took your listing photos, copyright is the right in play and you already own it. If a seller is trading under your brand name, that is a trademark question and a registration changes what you can do about it.
Do I trademark or copyright a logo? +
Usually both, and the trademark side is the one that matters. A logo used on your goods is a mark under the Lanham Act, because it identifies and distinguishes the goods and indicates their source. The copyright side turns on how much creative expression the drawing carries. The Copyright Office will not register a familiar symbol or a simple combination of a few of them, and 37 CFR 202.1 excludes typeface as typeface, so a wordmark set in a font is out. A drawn emblem with real illustration in it is often registrable.
Is Coca-Cola a trademark or a copyright? +
The name and the script it is written in work as trademarks, because they identify one source of goods to buyers. The bottle shape is the kind of thing trade dress law reaches. A photograph in an advertisement, or the text of that advertisement, is the kind of thing copyright reaches. One brand carries several rights over several assets. The question is not which right a company has. It is which right covers the thing that got copied.
What cannot be copyrighted? +
Two lists answer this, and neither has three items on it. 17 U.S.C. 102(b) says copyright never extends to "any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery". 37 CFR 202.1 adds what the Copyright Office will not register: "Words and short phrases such as names, titles, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering or coloring", and typeface as typeface. For a product business that puts the brand name, the product name, the domain and the tagline outside copyright entirely.
How much does it cost to trademark and copyright a logo? +
As of September 2026, a federal trademark application is $350 per class of goods, and that fee buys examination rather than a registration. A copyright registration for one logo design is $45 as a single application, which needs one author, one claimant and a work not made for hire, or $65 as a standard application, which is where a design a company owns as a work made for hire lands. So the pair runs about $395 to $415 for one class and one design, before an attorney and before the trademark maintenance filings. The Copyright Office proposed a fee increase on March 20, 2026.
Can I trademark my logo myself? +
You can file the application yourself, and many applicants do. A first filing rarely sails through. In the third quarter of fiscal year 2026 the USPTO approved 36.03% of base filing option applications on first action, so roughly 64% drew an office action from an examining attorney. An office action is a letter you have to answer correctly and on time. Two things usually decide the outcome: whether your mark is distinctive enough, and whether it is confusable with an existing one. Those are the judgments a first-time filer is least equipped to make.
What are the four types of trademarks? +
The useful version of this question is the distinctiveness spectrum, and it has five rungs rather than four. The USPTO describes fanciful marks as invented words that "only have meaning in relation to their goods or services", arbitrary marks as "actual words that have no association with the underlying goods or services", and suggestive marks as words that "suggest some quality of the goods or services, but don't state that quality of the goods or services outright". Those three are strong. Descriptive marks merely describe an aspect of the goods and are weak. Generic terms are "the common, everyday name" for the goods and cannot function as marks at all.
Should I get a trademark or an LLC first? +
They are unrelated filings and neither one produces the other. Forming an LLC creates a company with a state, and the name on that formation record is a business registration, not a mark. Trademark rights come from using a name in commerce on goods, and a federal registration comes from the USPTO. Two businesses can hold the same LLC name in different states, and the formation filing alone gives neither one a right to stop the other, and a company can own a mark that has nothing to do with its legal entity name.
Can you lose a copyright if you don't protect it? +
No. A copyright is not lost by failing to chase copies, and there is no duty to police it. It runs for its statutory term whatever you do. Trademark is the right that behaves the way people imagine copyright behaves: a mark can be abandoned when use stops, and can be lost to genericide when the public stops reading it as a source and starts reading it as the name of the product. Even there, nobody loses a mark by declining to sue one particular seller.
What is the 70 year rule for copyright? +
17 U.S.C. 302(a) runs the copyright term for a work created on or after January 1, 1978 for the life of the author plus 70 years. Section 302(c) sets a different clock for a work made for hire: 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first. So photographs your staff shot for the company run on the 95 or 120 year clock. A photograph a freelancer shot and later assigned to you is still measured against that photographer's life, because an assignment moves ownership and not the term.
Do I need a registration to send a takedown notice? +
For a copyright claim, no. The elements a notice must contain are listed in 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3), and a registration number is not one of them. That is why a stolen-photo claim can be filed today by a brand that has never filed anything. For a trademark claim the answer is usually the opposite. Amazon requires a federally registered mark and excludes pending applications, Shopify's trademark form asks for a registration number, and Etsy's trademark claims fail where the mark is dead or is only an application.
Cite this page
Pigford, Josh. "Copyright vs trademark: which one covers what got copied." Knockoff, published September 1, 2026. https://knockoff.co/guides/copyright-vs-trademark
Sources and dates
Copyright law, read September 1, 2026: 17 U.S.C. 102 for original works of authorship, the eight categories of subject matter and the 102(b) exclusions, 101 for the useful article definition and the separability limit, 401 for optional notice and the innocent-infringement point, and 512 for the six notice elements at 512(c)(3)(A) and the 512(f) misrepresentation liability; 37 CFR 202.1 for the unregistrable list; Circular 33, Works Not Protected by Copyright for the words-and-short-phrases explanation, the familiar-symbols passage and the pointer to trademark law; and the Copyright Office general FAQ for the poor man's copyright answer. Fees are from the Office's published schedule, current as of September 2026, with a proposed increase published March 20, 2026 and comments closed May 4, 2026. Processing time of 4.1 months covers claims closed October 1, 2025 through March 31, 2026. Case law: Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc., No. 15-866 (U.S. Mar. 22, 2017), quoted from the syllabus; Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, 586 U.S. 296 (2019); and Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 815 F.3d 1145 (9th Cir. 2016), cited and not quoted here.
Trademark law, read September 1, 2026: 15 U.S.C. 1127 for the definition of a mark, 1125 for the unregistered-mark claim at (a)(1)(A), the non-functionality burden at (a)(3) and dilution at (c)(1), 1115 for prima facie and conclusive evidence, and 1111 for the notice requirement attached to profits and damages; Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Samara Brothers, Inc., No. 99-150 (U.S. Mar. 22, 2000), quoted from the syllabus; the USPTO's page on registering for the geographic limit on common-law rights and the list of what registration adds; and the USPTO's page on strong trademarks for the fanciful, arbitrary, suggestive, descriptive and generic definitions. The subject-matter split is from the USPTO's trademark, patent and copyright basics page (published March 31, 2021, updated February 3, 2025). Fees, pendency of 4.2 months to first action and 9.77 months total across all filings, and the 36.03% first-action approval rate for base filing option applications are from the USPTO trademarks dashboard data for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026; the fee page was last updated January 18, 2025. Trade secret: 18 U.S.C. 1839(3).
Statistics: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Table C-2A for the 7,933 copyright, 4,217 trademark and 4,121 patent filings in the twelve months ending September 30, 2025, which count suits filed and not outcomes; the U.S. Copyright Office annual report for fiscal year 2025 for 510,003 claims received, 415,780 registered, 79,712 visual arts registrations and the group photograph counts; and the USPTO agency financial report for fiscal year 2025 for 824,192 trademark application classes. Etsy figures come from Etsy's own transparency reports, read September 1, 2026: 2025, 2024 and 2023, including the counter-notice and rejection rates quoted above. Patent fees and pendency figures are the USPTO figures used in our patent guide, current as of September 2026.
Knockoff sells brand protection software and is not a neutral party. Knockoff is not a law firm and this page is general information rather than legal advice. Fees, forms, processing times and platform requirements change, so read the source before you rely on a figure here.
