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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 8317178" data-attributes="member: 6669048">This is a very important distinction under United States intellectual property law that is getting glossed over in a lot of these discussions.Copyright is granted upon the creation of a work and requires no "defending". Copyright rights are very broad. You own the copyright for the work in any medium regardless of what medium you created it in. Write a short story and nobody can go and turn it into a movie or song or whatever without your permission. Copyright's purpose is to protect artistic expression so that the creator (or current rights holder to the creation) retains control over it.Trademark are exactly what they say - a "mark" that is used in "trade" in order to identify a particular product or brand. Trademark rights are very narrowly defined. A trademark must be actively used in commerce for a specific, declared purpose and must be actively defended. If you do not plan to use a trademark in commerce, you can't register it. If you register a trademark for selling a particular thing, you own it only for selling that particular thing. The trademark for the word "Matrix" is registered to multiple companies - to Warner Bros for the title of the film, to Toyota for the name of a car, to L'Oreal for make-up and beauty products, etc. The purpose of a trademark is to prevent consumer confusion when they make a purchase - If you see a car called "Matrix", you are not likely to assume it has anything to do with Keanu Reeves being The One or with eyeliner and blush.A work can be protected by both copyright and by trademark. If I design a logo for my company, I own the copyright to that artwork. I can then register that logo as a trademark as well, granting me a separate set of intellectual property rights over that logo. If I don't register the trademark or allow the trademark to lapse, I still own the copyright of that image.This distinction is what will be important in what ends up happening with this mess. Justin LaNasa and Ernie Gygax can register the trademark for "TSR", but that does not give them the copyright to TSR's work nor does it make them the same company founded in 1973 by Gary Gygax and Don Kaye. They also do not have the copyright to the old logos of TSR just because they own the trademark "TSR". The copyright to those logos resides with the current rights-holder, which (unless they're some weirdness going on) would be Wizards of the Coast and/or Hasbro. This is why Wizards of the Coast can continue reprinting the old Basic, 1st, and 2nd Ed Dungeons & Dragons materials with the TSR logo as-is - they own the copyright to that logo even if they've allowed the copyright to lapse.And if that seems complicated, this is the very basic summary of the differences between the two and it gets a LOT more complicated and confusing from there. This is why there are lawyers who specialize in intellectual property, copyright, and trademark law.</blockquote>

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