Intellectual Property Law in Puerto Rico

Protecting Your IP Rights

Puerto Rico IP law provides several ways to protect your intellectual property. The most common methods are patents, trademarks and service marks, and copyrights.

Ferraiuoli Torres Marchand & Rovira offers full-service intellectual property coverage:

• Counseling
• Prosecution
• Licensing
• Litigation

Ways To Protect Your Intellectual Property in Puerto Rico

Here are ways that Ferraiuoli Torres Marchand & Rovira can protect your intellectual property under Puerto Rico IP law.

Patents

Patents protect your inventions or designs. IP law allows for these types of patents:

• Utility patents protect the invention of a process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter that is new, useful, and nonobvious.
• Design patents protect the design of an article of manufacture that is new, useful, and ornamental.
• Plant patents protect any distinct or new variety of plant.

The term for patents generally is 20 years from the date on which the patent application was filed. Patents grant the holder “the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling” the invention in the United States or importing the invention into the United States.

Trademarks and service marks

Trademarks and service marks are the words, names, symbols, or devices used to identify goods and services and to distinguish them from the goods and services sold by others.

Protection is available for those distinguishing words, names, symbols, or devices. However, trademarks or service marks that merely describe a class of goods or services are not protected.

Trademarks and service marks can prevent others from using a similarly confusing mark. However, trademarks and service marks cannot prevent others from making the same goods or selling the same services under a clearly different mark.

Copyrights

Copyrights protect authors of “original works of authorship.” There are several types of “original works of authorship”:

• Literary works
• Dramatic works
• Musical works
• Artistic works
• Certain other intellectual works

Copyrights protect the form of expression, not the subject matter of the work. Copyright protection is available for both published and unpublished works.

Call 1 787 766-7000 for intellectual property law in Puerto Rico.