Copyright & Trademark for Technology Companies
Your code and your brand are assets. We handle copyright protection for software, open-source compliance, and trademark strategy for technology companies.
Copyright in Software: Code, UI, and APIs
Copyright protects software automatically from the moment it is written — source code, object code, and substantial portions of user interfaces all qualify as works of authorship. But the scope of that protection has real limits that matter to technology companies: copyright covers expression, not ideas, so the functionality of your software, its algorithms, and its methods of operation fall outside copyright's reach even when the code itself is protected.
The boundary questions are where companies need counsel. How much protection does a user interface get? What can a competitor lawfully reimplement? After the Supreme Court's decision in Google v. Oracle — which held Google's copying of Java API declarations to be fair use — the treatment of APIs and interface specifications remains a fact-specific inquiry rather than a bright-line rule. We help clients understand what their copyright actually protects, what it does not, and where patent, trade secret, or contract protection should fill the gaps.
Registration and Licensing
Although copyright exists without registration, registering with the U.S. Copyright Office is a prerequisite to filing an infringement suit for U.S. works, and timely registration unlocks statutory damages and attorney's fees — remedies that often determine whether enforcement is economically viable at all. For software, registration involves judgment calls: what deposit material to submit, how to handle trade secret material within the code, and how to manage registrations across versions.
Licensing is the other half of software copyright practice. We draft and review the agreements through which software value actually moves: end-user license agreements, SaaS subscription terms, source-code licenses, and the development and IP-assignment agreements that determine who owns the code in the first place.
Open-Source License Compliance
Nearly every modern codebase incorporates open-source components, and every one of those components arrives with license obligations. Permissive licenses such as MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0 generally require attribution and license-notice preservation — Apache 2.0 additionally includes an express patent grant and a patent-retaliation clause. Copyleft licenses such as the GPL go further: distributing a work based on GPL code can require releasing your own source code under the same terms, an obligation that can be fundamentally incompatible with a proprietary licensing model.
Open-source problems surface at the worst times — acquisition diligence, enterprise sales reviews, investor due diligence. We help clients audit their dependency trees, build sensible open-source usage policies for their engineering teams, remediate incompatible components, and respond when a compliance question arrives from the outside.
Trademark Strategy for Technology Brands
A product name, company name, or logo becomes valuable exactly when it becomes worth copying. Trademark protection for technology companies begins before launch with clearance: searching existing registrations and common-law uses so you do not invest in a brand someone else already owns. Rebranding after launch — or after a demand letter — costs far more than clearing the name up front.
From there we handle federal registration with the USPTO, including selecting the right classes for software and SaaS offerings and responding to office actions, followed by ongoing protection: monitoring for confusingly similar marks, handling domain and app-store disputes, and enforcing your rights when a competitor crowds your brand.
- Trademark clearance searches and risk assessment
- Federal registration and USPTO office action responses
- Brand enforcement and dispute resolution
- Domain name and app-store disputes
How We Help
- Copyright registration and licensing
- Software-specific copyright (code, UI, APIs)
- Fair use and DMCA provisions
- Open source licensing compliance (GPL, MIT, Apache, BSD)
- Software license drafting and review
Related Practice Areas
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