You definitely wouldn’t want to lose your business to someone else who has conveniently copied your logo to use as their own. Protecting your logo from plagiarism or trademark infringement is one of the most important steps you can take to protect your brand identity. People often confuse copyright protection and trademark protection as the same thing. Although both protect your brand identity, copyright protects the logo and trademark defends the logo, brand name, or slogan as used in the marketplace.

This article will delve into copyright protection of your client’s company logo design. To protect your logo, you need to know how to protect it.

According to the US Copyright Office, “Copyright protection may be available for logo artwork that contains sufficient authorship.” This means that the following types of logos cannot be protected by copyright laws:

• Commonly used symbols or designs such as Latin cross, peace signs or arrows
• Logos that contain text that only has mere variations in fonts, lettering, colors, for example, Times New Roman text or red text.

The term “sufficient authorship” means that the logo must have a certain degree of creativity and innovation. If your business uses a logo selected from a free to use online source or from an MS Word clip art directory, your logo will not be eligible for copyright protection.

The following are the steps you need to take to ensure copyright protection for your logo:

Correctly mark your work as copyrighted: To avoid mistakes of ignorance by others, please mark your logo as copyrighted. This will warn people about the consequences of deliberate copying.

Register your company logo: Register your company logo or any artwork or promotional material you want to protect against infringement with the country’s copyright services. Registration can be done even before the launch of the company. This process is very simple and involves filling out a few forms.

Support your claim with sufficient evidence: Does the company logo copyright application need to have supporting evidence that speaks to how work on the logo design progressed? Who was the author of the work? What is it about the logo that makes it unique?

In case of joint ventures: If your company is a joint venture, agree in advance who will inherit the logo if one of the partners leaves the company.

Plagiarism has become a very serious threat to creativity, copyrighting your logo is a must from every angle to safeguard your brand identity. The delay in taking these steps can cost you all your efforts to establish a brand identity.