In the United States there are three things that help protect the work of creators. These three items are copyright, trademark, and patents. Each of the three is different in what they protect, and for the lengths of time they protect a work.

First we will talk about copyright as it's the most widely known. Sometimes people use the word "copyright" when they really mean a trademark or a patent.

From the Copyright Office's website, they say a copyright is a protection given to the creators of "original works of authorship"—these would include literary, musical, dramatic, and other works of an intellectual nature. The benefit of having a copyright on your work is that you have the exclusive and original right to copy your work and distribute it without any restrictions. You can sell your work for money, lend the work, display it publicly, or put it in Creative Commons with certain restrictions.

The length of a copyright term has changed often throughout the history of this country, but currently the length of a copyright is the life of the creator, plus 70 years after their death. However, if the work was created as a work for hire for a corporation, then the term is 95 years or 120 years after it was first created, whichever comes first.

In the past, copyright was something that had to be applied for, granted, and then renewed after so many years. Some items have passed into the public domain due to not being renewed in the past or for failure to have a copyright symbol properly affixed to the work. For works created today, this is no longer the case. All work is copyrighted as soon as it has been created, but many people opt to have their work officially registered in the Copyright Office in case they have to file litigation against someone for infringing upon their work.

A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination of those four items that distinguishes the source of one set of goods from another. These are commonly used as logos on cans of soda, packages of lunch meat, DVDs of television shows, or just about anything else. Most items created and sold today have a logo that could be trademarked. Most slogans used by anything from fast food franchises to grocery stores to radio stations could possibly be trademarked.

Once you file a trademark application, and have it approved, you must file "Declaration of Use under Section 8" paperwork between the fifth and sixth year after the original filing. You must also file a "Declaration of Use and Application for Renewal under Sections 8 and 9" form between the ninth and tenth year after registering the trademark, and then again for every ten years. Failure to continue to keep up the registration is grounds for having the trademark revert back to being unregistered. You could still use the mark after it reverts to being unregistered mark.

Finally, there are patents. Patents are like copyrights in that they protect a work, mostly inventions, but they can also be applied to software, methods of doing business, and even genes. Most patents are in effect for 20 years. For example, a pharmaceutical company creates a drug, Drug A. That company has the right to be the only company that can create Drug A for 20 years. Once those 20 years have elapsed, that patent falls into the public domain and other companies can also create Drug A.

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