Clients often ask how they can protect their hard work from being stolen by imitators. Most think a patent is like Kevlar when it comes to fending off ripoff artists. They’re an important part of protecting your (manufactured) work, but we think an equally important level of security is afforded by trademarking a unique identifier for your product.

All you have to do is Google “Chinese copyright” to get a sense of the problem. The full magnitude of violations is huge; right now, the biggest stick in reining in the IP thieves are the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics and the embarassing fallout the Chinese government hopes to avoid by launching an internal crackdown on the wholesale stealing of protected Western ideas.

While copyright is usually the second process that comes to mind in any discussion concerning intellectual property, that category was primarily designed to benefit fine art creators – publishers, writers, photographers, now web creators – and which extends to the marketing and advertising community.

For marketeers, the trademark – done properly – is a practical, powerful tool that can afford broad protection. A well crafted slogan or a distinctive package design convey a product identification in the audience’s mind that’s hard to imitate without bringing up second best comparisons by default.

For instance. Have It Your Way® is the Burger King iconic slogan that does a much better job of brand protection than a patented method of burger construction. You could try Have It Our Way but that wouldn’t work. Neither would Get It Your Way, or any of dozens of other variations (in connection with a fast food burger).

While not every trademark attempt works out as anticipated – HD’s silly potato-potato invocation of a unique exhaust sound didn’t live up to the unique level of NBC’s protected ding-dong-ding network gong and was denied. Otherwise, enforcement would’ve been an interesting exercise during court arguments.

Our two cents says that if you want to protect your hard work in the open market, consider a well thought out creative-driven approach to identify the finest aspects of your product and then protect them in the marketplace.

Read more over at the light is green blog.